Sensation Chapter 5 Summary

During chapter 5, I learned that sensation is used in our everyday lives. Sensation is when a person grasps certain energy from their surroundings and interprets it as neural signs and signals. The way people interpret these signs is the process called perception. There are different processes in which we encode these signals such as bottom up processing and top down processing. The difference between these two possesses is that the bottom up processing begins at the entry level and the top down processing is when people draw sensations from the bottom-up brain and in addition their previous experiences and what they think will eventually occur

Analyzing sensation is more complex than one thinks. For example there are a lot of factors psychophysics must analyze such as thresholds. Psychophysics is those individuals who are entitled to study how energy affects an individual’s psychological past experiences. One significant factor is an absolute threshold. An absolute threshold is the minimum stimulation required to perceive specific factors such as our five sensory motions that are the sound, pressure, taste, smell, and eye vision. Through this threshold many different individuals hold different perceptions about those factors.

The difference threshold which is also referred to as the “just noticeable difference or jnd” is the minimum amount required to differentiate the perception between absolutely any two stimuli. An example of this threshold is when a person can detect when someone adds a small amount of weight to a much greater weight. In further detail it can be when someone adds 20 grams to a 200 gram weight. On the other hand if someone were to add 20 grams to a 2 kilogram weight a person would not notice the difference and the reason for that is because the difference threshold has