PSYC 106 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Cerebral Cortex, Binding Problem, Subjective Constancy

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 106
• Professor: Sherri Atwood

Document Summary

Sensation is simple stimulation of a sense organ. It is the basic registration of light, sound, pressure, odor, or taste as parts of your body interact with the physical world. After a sensation registers in your central nervous system, perception takes place at the level of your brain: the organization, identification, and interpretation of a sensation in order to form a mental representation. It all depends on the process of transduction, which occurs when many sensors in the body convert physical signals from the environment into encoded neural signals sent to the central nervous system. German scientist and philosopher gustav fechner (1801 1887) developed a new approach to measuring sensation and perception called psychophysics: : methods that measure the strength of a stimulus and the observer"s sensitivity to that stimulus. Simplest quantitative measurement in psychophysics is the absolute threshold, the minimal intensity needed to just barely detect a stimulus in 50% of the trials.