Week 4 — Sensation & Perception

Welcome to your Week 4 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A hearing-clinic technician finding the softest tone a person can hear and a delivery driver judging distance at dusk both rely on how people sense and perceive.

In plain language

Everything you know about the world arrives through your senses, but your senses do not hand your brain a finished picture. Sensation is the first step, when your eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue pick up energy from the world and turn it into signals your nerves can carry. Perception is the second step, when your brain sorts those signals and decides what they mean, like hearing a jumble of sounds as your own name. This week you will learn how psychologists measure the faintest thing you can sense and why a steady smell or sound fades from notice. You will also follow light and sound into the eye and ear, and see why what you see is built by your brain rather than copied from the world.

• Already covered: Week 1 measured mental processes; Week 2 taught operational definitions; Week 3 followed signals through neurons.
• This week: how energy becomes neural signals, and how the brain turns them into experience.
• How they connect: a sensory receptor is where Week 3's neural message begins.
• Where we're going next: Week 5, Consciousness, asks what it means to be aware of all this.

Focus

How does the world get in, and is what you see the world itself?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell sensation from perception, and bottom-up from top-down processing
• [ ] tell the absolute threshold from the difference threshold, and apply Weber's law
• [ ] explain sensory adaptation, rods versus cones, and hair cells
• [ ] show that perception is constructed using constancies and illusions

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 4 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and the slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: say whether a second candle lit beside a first is an absolute or a difference threshold, and why.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if a step snags.

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