Sensation and perception go hand and hand; however, I was not aware of their distinct differences prior to the intro to this course. Sensation deals with how our sensory receptors, as well as our nervous system, receive stimulus from our environment. In other words, it deals with the process of our body receiving the outside energy, such as sounds or pain. On the contrary, perception is how we organize that information once it has been received by our senses. Furthermore, perception is more the handling of the stimulus rather than the stimulus itself.
These two both deal with our senses, which gets confusing. I think the most important thing to remember when differentiating them is sensation correlates directly with our body receiving energy from our environment, while perception is our body organizing and analyzing the energy that our senses just picked up. The way I think about it is sensation almost deals with the more external side as it springs from the environment, and perception appears almost more internal as it is how our body deals with the stimulus.
One example that deals with sensation and perception would be the sounding of a fire alarm. First, our ears pick up the loud siren, thus signaling to us that something isn't right. The original hearing of the siren correlates with sensation in the sense that the sound is what our body receives from the environment originally to then begin the stage of perception. Our perception begins once we start analyzing the meaning behind the alarm and our panic begins to set in. Our brain starts to organize the extremity of the siren and what that means for the individual, including an escape plan. By utilizing a bottom-up process, our brain would analyze all the individual separate aspects of the alarm and what we know about alarms to conclude a final solution that brings all the possibilities together, helping us to comprehend what has happened. As for the top-down process, that deals with looking at the whole picture and comprehension of the situation and then from there breaking it down to understand how that conclusion was made.
Caroline,
ReplyDeleteYour way of deciphering the two was rather helpful in learning about sensation and perception. Thinking of sensation as what happens outside the body and thinking of perception as what happens inside the body drastically erases the confusion created by the topics.
Caroline,
ReplyDeleteYour in depth explanation of sensory and perception was fantastic. It sounded like what i wanted mine to be like. Your explanation was nice too, and clearly someone wanted a break from class to come. Well if today has shown, it paid off.