![]() Imagine, for instance, that you were asked to take a hearing test. In a typical psychophysics experiment, an individual is presented with a series of trials in which a signal is sometimes presented and sometimes not, or in which two stimuli are presented that are either the same or different. The absolute threshold of a sensation is defined as the intensity of a stimulus that allows an organism to just barely detect it. One important criterion is the ability to detect very faint stimuli. The measurement techniques developed by Fechner and his colleagues are designed in part to help determine the limits of human sensation. The field of psychophysics was founded by the German psychologist Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), who was the first to study the relationship between the strength of a stimulus and a person’s ability to detect the stimulus. Psychophysics is the branch of psychology that studies the effects of physical stimuli on sensory perceptions and mental states. We also have sensory systems that provide information about balance (the vestibular sense), body position and movement (proprioception and kinesthesia), pain (nociception), and temperature (thermoception). It turns out that this notion of five senses is oversimplified. You have probably known since elementary school that we have five senses: vision, hearing (audition), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation), and touch (somatosensation). The conversion from sensory stimulus energy to action potential is known as transduction. These cells relay messages, in the form of action potentials (as you learned when studying biopsychology), to the central nervous system. For example, light that enters the eye causes chemical changes in cells that line the back of the eye. When sensory information is detected by a sensory receptor, sensation has occurred. What does it mean to sense something? Sensory receptors are specialized neurones that respond to specific types of stimuli. Discuss the roles attention, motivation, and sensory adaptation play in perception. ![]()
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