Sensation and Perception

128

129

IN THE 1930S, A YOUNG ARCHITECT and designer named Donald Deskey won a competition to design the interiors for Radio City Music Hall in New York City. His design was met with immediate acclaim and enabled Deskey to create his own graphic design firm. In 1946, he helped to create the box design for Procter & Gamble’s revolutionary new laundry detergent, Tide, which used, for the first time, synthetic compounds rather than plain old soap (Hine, 1995). Although extremely familiar to us today, in 1946 the bold, blue lettered “Tide” emblazoned on bull’s-eye rings of yellow and orange marked the first use of eye-catching Day-Glo colours on a commercial product, and this mix of type and graphics was unlike any product design that anyone had seen before. The product would be impossible to miss on store shelves, and as admirers of the design observed, “it was the box itself that most dynamically conveyed the new product’s extraordinary power” (Dyer, Dalzell, & Olegario, 2004). Tide went to market in 1949 and Procter & Gamble never looked back.

Nowadays we are used to seeing advertisements that feature exciting, provocative, or even sexual images to sell products. In television commercials these images are accompanied by popular music that advertisers hope will evoke an overall mood favourable to the product. The notion is that the sight and sound of exciting things will become associated with what might be an otherwise drab product. This form of advertising is known as sensory branding (Lindstrom, 2005). The idea is to exploit all the senses to promote a product or a brand. Sensory branding goes beyond sight and sound by enlisting smell, taste, and touch as well as vision and hearing. That new-car smell you anticipate while you take a test drive? It is a manufactured fragrance sprayed into the car, carefully tested to evoke positive feelings among potential buyers. Bang and Olufsen, a Danish high-end stereo manufacturer, carefully designed its remote control units to have a certain distinctive “feel” in a user’s hand. Singapore Airlines, which has consistently been rated “the world’s best airline,” has actually patented the smell of their airplane cabins (it is called Stefan Floridian Waters).

These companies, just like Procter & Gamble back in 1946, recognize the power of sensation and perception to shape human experience and behaviour.

130

IN THIS CHAPTER WE WILL EXPLORE KEY INSIGHTS INTO THE NATURE of sensation and perception. These experiences are basic to survival and reproduction; we would not last long without the ability to accurately make sense of the world around us. Indeed, research on sensation and perception is the basis for much of psychology, a pathway toward understanding more complex cognition and behaviour such as memory, emotion, motivation, or decision making. Yet sensation and perception also sometimes reveal various kinds of illusions that you might see at a science fair or in a novelty shop: reminders that the act of perceiving the world is not as simple or straightforward as it might seem.

We will look at how physical energy in the world around us is encoded by our senses, sent to the brain, and enters conscious awareness. Vision is predominant among our senses; correspondingly, we will devote a fair amount of space to understanding how the visual system works. Then we will discuss how we perceive sound waves as words or music or noise, followed by the body senses, emphasizing touch, pain, and balance. We will end with the chemical senses of smell and taste, which together allow you to savour the foods you eat. But before doing any of that, we will provide a foundation for examining all of the sensory systems by reviewing how psychologists measure sensation and perception in the first place.