Gazzaniga • Heatherton • Halpern
FOURTH EDITION
Chapter 4
Sensation and Perception
©2013 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

“Sunny Mood”
It’s common sense that winter’s gloom can lower your spirits.
But until now, little scientific evidence has supported the folklore. This ScienCentral News video has more.

Learning Objectives
• Distinguish between sensation and perception.
• Describe the process of transduction.
• Distinguish between an absolute threshold and a difference threshold.
• Discuss sensory detection theory.
• Define sensory adaptation.

• Sensation: our sense organs’ detection and response to external stimulus energy and the transmission of those responses to the brain
• Perception: the brain’s processing of detected signals, resulting in internal representations of the stimuli that form a conscious experience of the world
• What we sense is the result of how we perceive

• Sensory coding: Sensory receptors translate the physical properties of stimuli into patterns of neural impulses
• Transduction: a process by which sensory receptors produce neural impulses when they receive physical or chemical stimulation
• The brain needs qualitative and quantitative
information about a stimulus
• Sensation and perception result from a symphony of sensory receptors and the neurons those receptors communicate with

• Psychologists try to understand the relationship between the world’s physical properties and how we sense and perceive them
• Psychophysics is a subfield that examines our psychological experiences of physical stimuli

“Golf and Perception”
Psychologists have found that golfers who’ve played well perceive the hole as bigger than it really is. As this ScienCentral
News video explains, the researchers also found those who did poorly see the hole smaller than it really is.

• Absolute threshold: the minimum intensity of stimulation that must occur before you experience a sensation
– Example: The absolute threshold for hearing is the faintest sound a person can detect 50 percent of the time
• Difference threshold: the minimum amount of change required for a person to detect a difference (i.e., the “just noticeable difference”)
• Weber’s law: states that the just noticeable difference between two stimuli is based on a proportion of the original stimulus rather than on a fixed amount of difference

• Signal detection theory (SDT): states that detecting a stimulus requires making a judgment about its presence or absence, based on a subjective interpretation of ambiguous information
– Example: A radiologist is looking at a CAT scan for the kind of faint shadow that signals an early-stage cancer. Her judgment will likely be affected by her knowledge of the patient, training, experience, motivation, attention and the knowledge of the consequences of being wrong
• Signal detection research involves a series of trials in which a stimulus is presented in only some trials. In each trial, the participant must state whether he or she sensed the stimulus

• Sensory adaptation: a decrease in sensitivity to a constant level of stimulation
• If a stimulus is presented continuously, the responses of the sensory systems that detect it tend to diminish over time; when a continuous stimulus stops, the sensory systems usually respond strongly as well

• For each of the five major senses — taste, smell, touch, hearing, and vision — identify the type of receptor and trace the neural pathway to the brain
• Distinguish between the neural processes associated with the experience of immediate pain and the experience of chronic pain
• Discuss color perception

• Gustation: the sense of taste
• Taste buds: sensory organs, mostly on the tongue; come in the form of tiny, mushroom-shaped structures (papillae)
– Stimulated taste buds send signals to the brain, which then produces the experience of taste
– Different regions of the tongue are not more sensitive to certain tastes (Lindemann, 2001)
• Every taste experience is composed of a mixture of five basic qualities: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and the relatively new taste sensation umami (Krulwich, 2007)
• Mothers can pass their eating preferences on to their offspring

“Seeing Hungry”
Why does food look more appealing when you are hungry?
Scientists are finding that the same chemical in your stomach that causes hunger also changes how your brain perceives food, as this ScienCentral News video explains.

“Bitter Taste Buds”
The human genome project has scientists diving into what makes us tick—and taste. To find alternatives to salt for masking bitterness in foods, researchers are investigating compounds that block bitter signals. This ScienCentral News video has more.

• Olfaction: the sense of smell
• Basic process:
– Odorants pass into the nose and nasal cavity
– Contact a thin layer of tissue embedded with smell receptors called the olfactory epithelium
– Smell receptors transmit information to the olfactory
bulb, the brain center for smell
– Has the most direct route to the brain
• Smell’s intensity is processed in brain areas also involved in emotion and memory (Anderson, Christoff et al.,
2003)

“Super Smellers”
Why do nearly half of all people over age 65 lose some of their sense of smell? As this ScienCentral News video reports, some super-smelling mice might hold the answer.

• Haptic sense: the sense of touch
• Sense conveys sensations of temperature, pressure, pain, and where our limbs are in space
• The integration of various signals and higher-level mental processes produces haptic experiences
• Examples:
– Stroking multiple pressure points can produce a tickling sensation, which can be pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the mental state of the person being tickled
– Brain areas involved in touch sensation respond less to selfproduced tactile stimulation than to external tactile stimulation
(Blakemore, Wolpert, & Frith, 1998)

• Pain is part of a warning system that stops you from continuing activities that may harm you
• Two kinds of nerve fibers have been identified for pain:
– Fast fibers for sharp, immediate pain; activated by strong physical pressure and temperature extremes
– Slow fibers for chronic, dull, steady pain; activated by chemical changes in tissue when skin is damaged

“Brain Pain”
The pain of severe burns may be the most excruciating pain a person can experience. But, as this ScienCentral News video reports, the August issue of Scientific American describes how the ultimate in pain may be eased by the ultimate in high-tech distractions.

• Audition: the sense of sound
• Movements and vibrations of objects cause the displacement of air molecules, which produce a sound wave (change in air pressure that travels through the air)
• A sound wave’s amplitude determines loudness; its frequency determines pitch
• The ears convert sound waves to brain activity, which produces the sensation of sound

• Cochlear implantation has helped people with severe hearing problems due to the loss of hair cells in the inner ear
• Works by directly stimulating the auditory nerve; does not not amplify sound
• When devices are implanted in children born deaf, the child’s hearing will be quite functional and he/she will learn to speak reasonably normally
• The problem of audism

“Hearing Motion”
Imagine if words created a taste in your mouth or music generated bursts of color. These are the effects of a rare condition called synesthesia. Now scientists have found a new type of the condition: people who “hear” motion.

• Most of the scientific study of sensation and of perception is concerned with vision
• Very little of what we call seeing takes place in the eyes, but rather as a result of constructive processes that occur throughout much of the brain
• Basic structures: cornea, lens, pupil, iris, retina

• The retina has two types of receptor cells:
– Rods: respond at extremely low levels of illumination; responsible primarily for night vision; found on outer edges of the retina
– Cones: less sensitive to low levels of light; responsible primarily for vision under high illumination and for seeing both color and detail; found throughout the retina but concentrated at the fovea
• Contain photopigments that initiate the transduction of light waves into electrical neural impulses

• A variety of retinal cells perform a series of sophisticated computations that help the visual system process the incoming information
• Cells include: bipolar, amacrine, and horizontal cells; converge on about a million retinal ganglion cells
• Ganglion cells are the first neurons in the visual pathway with axons, which are gathered into a bundle called the optic nerve
• At the optic chiasm, axons in the optic nerves cross to the left and right hemispheres, travel to visual areas of the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe

“Artificial Eye”
A camera that transmits pictures into the brain is given some visually impaired people the chance at partial eyesight again.
This ScienCentral News video has more.

• An object appears to be a particular color because of the wavelengths of light it reflects
• Trichromatic theory: activity in three different types of cones that are sensitive to different wavelengths
• Opponent-process theory: Different types of ganglion cells, working in opposing pairs, create the perception that R/G, B/Y are opposites
• We categorize color along three dimensions: hue, saturation, and brightness

• Color can be produced through either the subtractive or the additive mixture of wavelengths
• Subtractive color mixing: a process of color mixing that occurs within the stimulus itself; a physical, not psychological, process
– Mixing paints is one form of subtractive color mixing because the colors are determined by pigments.
– Wavelengths that a pigment does not absorb are reflected and enter the eye
• Red, yellow, and blue are the subtractive primary colors because together these pigments absorb nearly all the colors of the visible spectrum and when mixed, produce black

• Additive color mixing: a process of color mixing that occurs when different wavelengths of light interact within the eye’s receptors; a psychological process
• Additive primary colors are red, green, and blue because mixing them yields white light

“Wearing Red: An Olympic Advantage?”
Wondering who’s got an edge in the next game or Olympic event? Here’s a hint: Watch out for the contenders in red. This
ScienCentral News video has more.

“Red and Lower Test Scores”
When final exams loom, here’s a study worth some study: psychology researchers say that seeing even a glimpse of the color red can affect test performance. This ScienCentral News video explains.

• Humans, like other animals, have several internal sensory systems in addition to the five primary senses
• Kinesthetic sense: perception of the body’s position in space and movements of our bodies and our limbs (some include this with the sense of touch)
• Vestibular sense: perception of balance; uses information from receptors in the semicircular canals of the inner ear

• Identify the primary sensory areas for touch, hearing, and vision.
• Discuss the gate control theory of pain.
• Explain how the brain localizes sound.
• Distinguish between the “what” and “where” pathways of the visual system.
• Describe blindsight.

• With the exception of olfaction, all sensory information is relayed from the thalamus to cortical and other areas of the brain
• Information is projected separately from the thalamus to primary sensory areas of the cerebral cortex
• In these areas the perceptual process begins in earnest

• Touch information from the thalamus is projected to the primary somatosensory cortex
• In the 1940s, Wilder Penfield discovered that electrical stimulation of the primary somatosensory cortex could evoke the sensation of touch in different regions of the body (Penfield & Jasper, 1954)
• The most sensitive regions of the body, such as lips and fingers, have a greater amount of cortex devoted to them

• Pain is a complex experience that depends on biological, psychological, and cultural factors
• Melzack’s gate control theory of pain: Pain receptors must be activated and a neural
“gate” in the spinal cord must allow the signals through to the brain
• Pain signals transmitted by small-diameter nerve fibers can be blocked at the level of the spinal cord by the firing of larger sensory nerve fibers

• Drug treatments (ibuprofen, acetaminophen,
Novocain, anesthetics)
• Cognitive states (distraction, positive mood, relaxation) can close the pain gate
• Some mental processes, such as worrying about or focusing on the painful stimulus, seem to open pain gates
– Well-rested research participants rated the same level of a painful stimulus as less painful than did participants who were fearful, anxious, or depressed (Loggia, Mogil, & Bushnell, 2008;
Sullivan et al., 2001)

“Scared Slow”
After a car accident or other scary experience, many people report feeling like the event happened in slow motion. One neuroscientist set out to test whether our brains really perceive things slowed down in response to fear. This
ScienCentral News story shows why he had to scare people in order to do the experiment.

• Auditory neurons in the thalamus extend their axons to the primary auditory cortex
• Neurons in the primary auditory cortex code the frequency (or pitch) of auditory stimuli
• To locate the origin of a sound (auditory localization), the brain integrates the different sensory information coming from each of our two ears

• The study of perception has focused to a large extent on the primary visual cortex and the multiple areas in which the retinal image is processed
• According to some estimates, up to half of the cerebral cortex may participate in visual perception

• Visual areas beyond the primary visual cortex form two parallel processing streams, or pathways
• Ventral stream appears to be specialized for the perception and recognition of objects
• Dorsal stream seems to be specialized for spatial perception (determining where an object is)
• These two processing streams are therefore known as the “what” stream and the “where” stream

• Blindsight: a condition in which people who are blind have some visual capacities in the absence of any visual awareness
• Example: A person might not be able to see anything on his or her left. However, when a stimulus is presented in this blind field, the patient can respond unconsciously to that stimulus

• Describe the Gestalt principles of perceptual organization.
• Identify the brain regions associated with facial perception.
• Identify cues for depth perception.
• Explain how the visual system perceives motion.
• Discuss how perceptual constancy is achieved.

• Perceptual psychologists believe that illusions reveal the mechanisms that help our visual systems determine the sizes and distances of objects in the visual environment
• Researchers rely on these tricks to reveal automatic perceptual systems that, in most circumstances, result in accurate perception

• The German word Gestalt means “shape” or
“form.” As used in psychology, Gestalt means
“organized whole.”
• Gestalt psychology postulated a series of laws to explain how our brains group the perceived features of a visual scene into organized wholes

• Among the most basic organizing principles is distinguishing between figure and ground
• A classic illustration of this is the reversible
figure illusion, in which figure and ground switch back and forth (ambiguous)
• In identifying what is “figure,” the brain assigns the rest of the scene to the background

• Two of the most important Gestalt principles concern proximity and similarity
• Principle of proximity: The closer two figures are to each other, the more likely we are to group them and see them as part of the same object
• Principle of similarity: We tend to group figures according to how closely they resemble each other

• Good continuation: the tendency to interpret intersecting lines as continuous rather than as changing direction radically
• Closure: the tendency to complete figures that have gaps
• Illusory contours: We sometimes perceive contours and cues to depth even though they do not exist

• How do we assemble the information about parts into a perception of a whole object?
– Bottom-up processing: Data are relayed in the brain from lower to higher levels of processing
– Top-down processing: Information at higher levels of mental processing can influence lower, “earlier” levels in the processing hierarchy
• The flight crew of New Zealand Flight 901 failed to notice the 12,000-foot volcano looming in front of them because the pilots saw what they expected to see

• The visual system is sensitive to faces:
– We can more readily discern information about a person’s mood, attentiveness, sex, race, and age by looking at a person’s face than by listening to them talk, watching them walk, or studying their clothing (Bruce & Young, 1986)
– Whites are much better at recognizing white faces than at recognizing black faces (Brigham & Malpass, 1985)
• Prosopagnosia: deficits in the ability to recognize faces
• Cortical regions, even specific neurons, seem to be specialized to perceive faces and are sensitive to facial expression and gaze direction

“Vote for You!”
Researchers have shown that voters can be swayed toward choosing a candidate by making the candidate look more like a voter. These visual manipulations were unnoticed, but were enough to swing the 2004 presidential election. The implications of the research go beyond digital manipulation and give a deeper insight into this year’s heated race.

“Election Faces”
New research shows that when it comes to voting, at least part of your decision is made in the blink of an eye. As this
ScienCentral video explains, voting involves parts of the brain that make quick decisions about the people you meet or see, including candidates for election.

• How are we able to construct a threedimensional mental representation of the visual world from two-dimensional retinal input?
• Binocular depth cues: available from both eyes together and contribute to bottom-up processing
• Monocular depth cues: available from each eye alone and provide organizational information for top-down processing

• Binocular disparity (or retinal disparity): This cue is caused by the distance between humans’ two eyes
– The brain uses the disparity between these two retinal images to compute distances to nearby objects
– Stereoscopic vision: the ability to determine an object’s depth based on that object’s projections to each eye
• Convergence: When eye muscles turn the eyes inward, the brain knows how much the eyes are converging and uses this information to perceive distance

• We can perceive depth with one eye because of monocular depth cues
• Pictorial depth cues:
– Occlusion
– Relative size
– Familiar size
– Linear perspective
– Texture gradient
– Position relative to horizon

• Motion parallax: The brain uses cues from the relative movements of objects that are at various distances from the observer
– When you watch the scenery from a moving car, near objects such as mailboxes seem to pass quickly, far objects more slowly, whereas objects farther away appear to match your speed
– Objects at an intermediate distance (a house) move opposite the direction of closer ones (a mailbox), whereas distant objects (a mountain) move in the same direction relative to the intermediate-distance object

• The size of an object’s retinal image depends on that object’s distance from the observer
• To determine an object’s size the visual system needs to know how far away it is
• Depth cues can fool us into seeing depth when it is not there; a lack of depth cues can fool us into not seeing depth when it is there

• Ames boxes: first crafted in the 1940s by
Adelbert Ames, a painter turned scientist
• Ames boxes’ rooms play with linear perspective and other distance cues to create size illusions

• Classic example of a size/distance illusion
• Explained: Monocular depth cues make the two-dimensional figure seem threedimensional (Rock, 1984)
• This illusion shows how much we rely on depth perception to gauge size; the brain uses depth cues even when depth is absent

• How does the brain know what is moving?
• After receiving damage to secondary visual areas of her brain — areas critical for motion perception—M.P., a German woman, saw the world as a series of snapshots rather than as a moving image (Zihl, von Cramon, & Mai, 1983)
• Neurons specialized for detecting movement fire when movement occurs

• Waterfall effect: If you stare at a waterfall and then turn away, the scenery you are now looking at will seem to move upward
• Explained:
– The visual cortex has neurons that respond to movement in a given direction
– When you stare at a moving stimulus long enough, these direction-specific neurons adapt to the motion and become fatigued
– When the stimulus is removed, other motion detectors that respond to all other directions are more active than the fatigued motion detectors

• When you see what appears to be a moving object, how do you know whether the object is moving, you are moving, or your eyes are moving?
• Explained:
– The brain calculates an object’s perceived movements by monitoring the movement of the eyes, and perhaps also of the head, as they track a moving object
– Motion detectors track an image’s motion across the retina

• Stroboscopic movement: a perceptual illusion that occurs when two or more slightly different images are presented in rapid succession
• Max Wertheimer conducted experiments in 1912 by flashing, at different intervals, two vertical lines placed close together
– When the interval was about 60 milliseconds, the line appeared to jump from one place to another
– At slightly longer intervals, the line appeared to move continuously — a phenomenon called phi movement

• How does the brain know that a person is 6 feet tall when the retinal image of that person changes size?
• Perceptual constancy: The brain correctly perceives objects as constant despite sensory data that could lead it to think otherwise
Size
Shape
Color
Lightness
• The brain computes a ratio based on relative magnitude rather than on sensations’ absolute magnitude; perceptual systems are tuned to detect changes from baseline conditions, not just to respond to sensory inputs