SENSATIONNS,

PERCEPTIONS,
REPRESENTATIONS

DIOR DENISIA
PSIHOLOGIE
AN I, I.D.

In psychology, sensation and perception are stages of processing of

the senses in human and animal systems, such as vision, auditory, vestibular, and pain
senses. Included in this topic is the study of illusions such as motion aftereffect, color
constancy, auditory illusions, and depth perception.
Sensation is the function of the low-level biochemical and neurological events
that begin with the impinging of a stimulus upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ.
It is the detection of the elementary properties of a stimulus.
Without sensations to tell us what is outside our own mental world, we would
live entirely in our own minds, separate from one another and unable to find food or
any other basics that sustain life. Sensations are the minds window to the world that
exists around us. Without perception, we would be unable to understand what all those
sensations meanperception is the process of interpreting the sensations we
experience so that we can act upon them.
How does sensation travel through the central nervous system, and why are
some sensations ignored?
Sensation is the activation of receptors located in the eyes, ears, skin, nasal
cavities, and tongue.
Sensory receptors are specialized forms of neurons that are activated by
different stimuli such as light and sound.
A just noticeable difference is the point at which a stimulus is detectable half
the time it is present.
Webers law of just noticeable differences states that the just noticeable
difference between two stimuli is always a constant.
Absolute thresholds are the smallest amount of energy needed for conscious
detection of a stimulus at least half the time it is present.
Subliminal stimuli are stimuli presented just below the level of conscious
awareness and subliminal perception has been demonstrated in the laboratory. It has
not been shown to be effective in advertising.
Habituation occurs when the brain ignores a constant stimulus.
Sensory adaptation occurs when the sensory receptors stop responding to a
constant stimulus.

Perception is the mental process or state that is reflected in statements like "I
see a uniformly blue wall", representing awareness or understanding of the real-world
cause of the sensory input. The goal of sensation is detection, the goal of perception is
to create useful information of the surroundings.
In other words, sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses to
represent stimuli from the environment, and perception is a higher brain function
about interpreting events and objects in the world. Stimuli from the environment are
transformed into neural signals, which are then interpreted by the brain, through a
process called transduction. Transduction is the physical process of converting stimuli
into biological signals that may further influence the internal state of the organism,
including the possible production of conscious awareness or perception.
The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, termed
the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound or another physical
process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs
transform the input energy into neural activitya process called transduction. This
raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus. These neural signals are
transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal
stimulus is the percept. Perception is sometimes described as the process of
constructing mental representations of distal stimuli using the information available in
proximal stimuli.
A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of
mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical
internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that
makes use of such a symbol; "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or
types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this."
Mental representations (or mental imagery) enable representing things that
have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist. Think of yourself
traveling to a place you have never been before, or having a third arm. These things
have either never happened or are impossible and do not exist, yet our brain and
mental imagery allows us to imagine them. Although visual imagery is more likely to
be recalled, mental imagery may involve representations in any of the sensory
modalities, such as, hearing, smell, or taste. Kosslyn proposes images are used to help
solve certain types of problems. We are able to visualize the objects in question and
mentally represent the images to solve it.

Bibliography:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensation_(psychology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_representation
http://www.sroda.com.pl/file/Chapter3--Sensation_and_Perception.pdf