Sensation and Perception
- What are Sensation and Perception? Why are they important to study? What kinds of changes in your life would you have to make if you suddenly could not feel pain? Think about your chosen field, how losing any one of the senses might affect your clients, students, etc. How would you help them adjust?
Sensation and perception are the physical and psychological processes through which sensory organs respond and make sense to external stimuli. Hearing and tasting sensory organs get involved in these processes (Wixted, & Serences, 2018). Sensation and stimulation enable individuals to make sense of the complex world around them. For example, individuals can determine the food they like and dislike because of tasting. Individuals would get irresponsible if they did not feel pain. For instant, they would participate in activities that destroy their physical bodies. Software engineering would get affected if they did not smell unusual smells to determine the software’s effective function (Arcuri, 2019). The clients would get explained the smell verbally they should expect when there is a malfunction in the system.
- Describe how perceptual constancies and the Gestalt principles account for common perceptual experiences.
Perceptual constancy includes the trend of perceiving a familiar object to having the same shape, size, and concentration despite the change in inducements. Gestalt principles suggest that individuals perceive objects according to the ground, proximity, similarity, and continuity and closure (Guberman, 2015). Gestalts principles hold that individuals interpreted things according to their experience in shape, size, and concentration. For instance, in software engineering, individuals create software and programs according to their knowledge in programming knowledge, including instructions for various attributes. For instance, they can interpret HyperText Markup (HTML) Language through the composition of letters.
- Describe how the neuroscientific study of magic can help to explain visual and cognitive illusions. The examples highlighted in your text are based on visual illusions; can you think of a magic trick or performance that may have been based on an illusion in a different sensory modality?
Magicians, according to neuroscience, manipulate the perceptions of their audience. Magicians control the audience’s attention to see what they want them to see (Wixted, & Serences, 2018). For example, the magicians may misdirect their audience’s attention using common social cues to think an object has disappeared. For example, a magician, a magician may not release the coin but directs the audience’s eyes to the direction the coin was supposed to go while releasing the coin in the opposite direction. The magician uses the audience’s memory of the direction the coin is supposed to create an illusion.
- Have you ever noticed that your sense of taste is affected when your nose is all stopped up? Why does this happen? Describe how the sense of taste and smell work separately and together. In your chosen field, explain the importance of these two senses. Be specific and give examples.
Smell and taste have separate sensing capabilities and receptors but are twined in their functions. One sense affects the other due to their connection with the oral cavity. The oral cavity is the pathway to the mind through which taste and smell interact to influence the perception. In computer science, tasting and smelling are used to test and refactor systems (Arcuri, 2019). For example, unusual scents (smell) would interpret to ineffective software (test/taste).
References
Arcuri, D. (2019). The Many Senses of Software Engineering. Medium. Retrieved 2 September 2020, from https://medium.com/@solidi/the-many-senses-of-software-engineering-aba9f289498c.
Guberman, S. (2015). On Gestalt theory principles. Gestalt Theory, 37(1), 25-44. https://www.academia.edu/download/40511720/On_Gestalt_theory_principles.pdf
Wixted, J. T., & Serences, J. (2018). Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensation, Perception, and Attention (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Pz9MDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Sensation,+Perception+and+Vision&ots=U43XIshgjx&sig=GxMdVew4A596EbqKK5kS3jam_H4