Chapter 4 Introduction

4Sensation and Perception

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Andrew Geiger

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  • Sensation and Perception Are Distinct Activities

    • Psychophysics
    • Measuring Thresholds
    • Signal Detection
    • THE REAL WORLD Multitasking
    • Sensory Adaptation

  • Vision I: How the Eyes and the Brain Convert light Waves to Neural Signals

    • Sensing Light
    • Perceiving Color
    • The Visual Brain

  • Vision II: Recognizing What We Perceive

    • Attention: The “Glue” That Binds Individual
    •      Features into a Whole
    • Recognizing Objects by Sight
    • Perceiving Depth and Size
    • Perceiving Motion and Change
    • CULTURE & COMMUNITY Does Culture Influence Change Blindness?

  • Audition: More Than Meets the Ear

    • Sensing Sound
    • The Human Ear
    • Perceiving Pitch
    • Localizing Sound Sources
    • Hearing Loss
    • HOT SCIENCE Music Training: Worth the Time

  • The Body Senses: More Than Skin Deep

    • Touch
    • Pain
    • Body Position, Movement, and Balance

  • The Chemical Senses: Adding Flavor

    • Smell
    • Taste

In 1946, a young designer named Donald Deskey 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 colors 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 the shelves of a store, 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.

Donald Deskey recognized the power of perception back in 1946, when he grabbed the attention of consumers by using eye-catching colors and a striking design on the first box of Tide.
The Photo Works

Nowadays, we’re used to seeing advertisements that feature exciting, provocative, or even sexual images to sell products. 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). Sensory branding often enlists sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as vision. In television commercials, these images are accompanied by popular music that advertisers hope will evoke an overall mood favorable to the product. That new-car smell you anticipate while you take a test drive? It’s a manufactured fragrance sprayed into the car, carefully tested to evoke positive feelings among potential buyers. Singapore Airlines, which has consistently been rated “the world’s best airline,” has actually patented the smell of their airplane cabins (it’s called Stefan Floridian Waters). Companies today, just like Procter & Gamble back in 1946, recognize the power of sensation and perception to shape human experience and behavior.

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In this chapter, we’ll explore key insights into the nature of sensation and perception. We’ll 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’ll devote a fair amount of space to understanding how the visual system works. Then we’ll discuss how we perceive sound waves as words or music or noise, followed by the body senses, emphasizing touch, pain, and balance. We’ll end with the chemical senses of smell and taste, which together allow you to savor 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.