Chapter 6 - Sensation and Perception

This whole chapter was on a persons sensations and perceptions. The things that I found interesting in this chapter were the absolute threshold, pain, and a persons depth perception.

Absolute threshold, is the minimum stimulation necessary to detect a particular light, sound pressure, taste or odor 50% of the time. This means that whenever we detect a sound, taste or odor we are usually about 50% right. As a person grows older their absolute threshold varies. Their sensitivity to high-pitched sounds declines, leaving them in need of louder sound.

Occasional pain is a good thing, it is telling us that something is wrong with our body. If we didn't feel pain, it would mean that something bigger is wrong. If you would sprain your ankle, the pain you feel is telling your brain that you need to not put so much pressure on that ankle. But a person with chronic pain, meaning they always feel pain. The pain they feel never really goes away, they might always have persistent or recurring back pain, arthritis or headaches.

The final thing that I found interesting was a person depth perception. Depth perception is seeing the world in three dimensions. This allows us estimate distance from us. Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk discovered that depth perception is innate. They did this by running a study with crawling infants and newborn animals.