Consciousness is a person’s awareness of the sensations, thoughts, and feelings at a given moment. Waking consciousness can vary from more active to more passive states. Altered states of consciousness include naturally occuring sleep and dreaming, as well as hypnotic and drug induced states. Using the electroencephalogram, or EEG, to study sleep, scientists have found ...
Perception is a contructive process in which people go beyond the stimuli that are physically present and try to construct a meaningful interpretation. The gestalt laws of organization are used to describe the way in which we organize bits and pieces of information into meaningful wholes, known as gestalts, through closure, proximity, similarity, and simplicity. ...
Sound, motion, and balance are centerd in the ear. Sounds in the form of vibrating air waves, enter through the outer ear and travel through the auditory canal until they reach the eardrum. The vibrations of the eardrum are transmitted into the middle ear, which consists of three bones: the hammer, the anvil, and the ...
Vision depends on sensitivity to light, electromagnetic waves in the visible part of the spectrum (wavelengths of roughly 390 to 770 nm) that are either refelected off by objects or produced by an energy source. The eye shapes the light into an image that is transformed into nerve impulses and interpreted by the brain. As ...
Sensation is the activation of the sense organs by any source of physical energy. In contrast, perception is the process by which we wort out, interpret, analyze, and integrate stimuli to which our senses are exposed. Psychophysics studies the relationship between the physical nature of stimuli and the sensory responses they evoke. The absolute threshold ...