Preview

Sensation , Perception , and Attention

Best Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1725 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Sensation , Perception , and Attention
Sensation, Perception, and Attention Every member of this Team has a specific and diverse attention sensation and perceptive process that is affected by his or her surroundings/environment. Sensation is defined as the process of bringing information from the outside world into the brain. This process is passive in a sense that the brain does not have to be engaged in sensing sensation. Perception is defined as the active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting the information brought to the brain by the senses. Our team will conduct a cognitive psychological test also known as dichotic listening and investigate each team members threshold for auditory stimuli. We will also attempt to discover how and why our attention was divided, and gather any relative information about sensory perception. The auditory threshold is, “The audibility limit of discriminating sound intensity and pitch” (Biology Online, 2005). We hear different pitches throughout every day of our lives and do not realize the kind of range that exists in these sound waves. Through the testing of the members in our group we found varying results in the limits between us. After taking an auditory threshold test online our group discovered that we each started to hear the noise at different points ranging from 20 Hz to 80 Hz. Each individual experienced the increasing noise, to the point it was uncontrollable, near the end of the test the noise dissipated, and we began to lose the sound around 13kHz-19 kHz. One of the team members showed rare results because of their ability to hear the noise throughout almost the entire test. The results that we found show how much the ability to hear different pitches differs from person to person. We do not encounter needs to examine the auditory threshold of ourselves daily, but it is the important role that this stimuli plays in our lives, which we fail to notice. The study of auditory threshold is more crucial than most people realize, specifically


References: Biology Online. (2005). Auditory Threshold. Retrieved from http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Auditory_threshold on October 24, 2011. Da Silva, W. R., De Souza, D.G., Bevilacqua, M.C., Lopes, J. (2011). Operant Measurement of Auditory Threshold in Prelingually Deaf Users of Cochlear Implants: II. Retrieved from http://www.psycneuro.org/index.php/psycneuro/article/viewFile/123/464 on October 24, 2011. Kowalski, R., & Westen, D. (2009). Psychology (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Sarter, M., Lustig, C. (2006). Attention and Learning and Memory University of California, Los Angeles. (n.d.) A Dichotic Listening Experiment. Retrieved from http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/dichotic/dichotic.html on October 23, 2011. University of California, Los Angeles. (n.d.) List of Sound Heard in the Dichotic Listening Experiment. Retrieved from http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Dichotic/dichotic_answers.html on October 22, 2011. Vatsek. (2007). Hearing Test. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G60hM1W_mk on October 24, 2011.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The Acoustic Reflex Threshold (ART) were tested at 500 Hz, 1000Hz, and 2000Hz. There was no indication of inner ear problems at these frequencies.…

    • 577 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Guidelines of the Control of Noise Exposure when Hearing Conservation Recommendations, Based on Detailed Octave-Band Data are not Available…

    • 1203 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    a. iris- A ring of muscle tissue that forms the colored portion of the eye around the pupil and controls the size of the pupil opening. Pigmented and responsible for the eye color.…

    • 1549 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Miss Emily Pozzuoli

    • 1031 Words
    • 4 Pages

    During the course of this experiment, the human threshold for perceived sound at particular amplitudes and frequencies was measured. The purpose of the experiment was to determine at exactly which amplitude sound waves would be perceived as audible to the human ear. In addition, determining if habituation or expectation occurred during the course of the testing is a goal of this experiment. Habituation is defined as occurring when a participant fails to change an answer quickly or changes an answer after the stimulus has passed. Expectation is defined as occurring when the participant expects a stimulus to change or occur when in fact it does not. Expectation can be measured by recording the times that the descending mean is greater than the ascending mean for a particular frequency. This threshold for audible sound was measured at six different frequencies, and the average thresholds…

    • 1031 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In this case, the view point comes from the individual opinions of each team member. Each member of the team expressed their experiences and comfort levels of dichotic listening, or the 'cocktail party' phenomenon. When comparing the similarities that each team member had, the majority of the group suggested that their dichotic listening skills are not as high as they would like but still multi listen at some point and time. Many of the team members have indicated that dealing with noises in the background at work seems to be a common occurrence for each of them. Of course this comes down to each person's individual outlook on the cocktail party phenomenon, but it is important to learn what a cocktail party phenomenon is. The cocktail party phenomenon pertains to a person's ability to listen to one conversation while several conversations or background noises are present. It is believed that a person can perform this function because of the human speech characteristics such as auditory system, or high levels perceptual and language processing (Kowalski & Westen, 2005). Of course, this ability is divided, some of the team members indicate that they can perform this skill without any problems and the other team members indicated that they have a hard time performing this skill. Therefore, the cocktail party…

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Galvin, J. J. I., - Fu, Q., & - Nogaki, G. – Melodic contour identification by cochlear implant listeners. Ear and Hearing, 28(3), 302.…

    • 1546 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this course, you will learn about the scientific study of cognitive processes. The focus will be on the research and theories that have been central to the field. Topics for the course include history, cognitive neuroscience, attention, sensation and perception, memory, language, computer models, decision making, problem solving, intelligence, and…

    • 1234 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    1. What would your world be like if you were unable to experience any external sensory stimulation? Be sure to include vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, pain, and the role of culture in your discussion.…

    • 507 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Great Gatsby

    • 3673 Words
    • 15 Pages

    2. Absolute Thresholds: the minimum stimulation needed to detect a particular stimulus 50% of the time ( light, sound, pressure, taste, odor); expose eats to varying sound level- each pitch, test defines where half the time you correctly detected the sound and half the time you do not…

    • 3673 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Best Essays

    The Stroop Effect

    • 2992 Words
    • 12 Pages

    Kahneman, D., and Henik, A. (1979). Perceptual organisiation and attention. In M. Kubovy and J.R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Perceptual organisation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Cited in Brown T.L., Joneleit K., Robinson C.S., Brown C.R.…

    • 2992 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    Senses and Stimuli

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages

    For the second experiment, I filled three bowls with water of varying temperatures. The first bowl was hot water, the second bowl, lukewarm water, and the third bowl was cold water. I then placed one hand in the hot water and one hand in the cold water and left them there for three minutes. Afterwards, I placed both hands in the bowl filled with both hot and cold. Upon doing this, the hand that was in the hot water felt cooler while the hand that was in the cold water felt warmer. It seems that the receptors were still feeling the original temperature of the hot and cold water that my hands had been in previously and had not yet adjusted to the new temperature of the lukewarm…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    My main take-away from this assignment is that hearing loss is not just a physical loss- it encompasses the entire person. It is a catalyst to other losses and issues. As I stated earlier, the psychosocial impact of hearing loss is just as hampering as the physical. Retiring from enjoyable activities and situations becomes fairly common. Feelings of angry, impatience, self-doubt came upon relatively easily. Altogether the deficits acted as one. As audiologist, we do not just treat hearing and balance issues, we treat an entire…

    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Psychology Midterm

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Selective attention: allows us to choose whch sensory inputs to focus on and what to ignore…

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sensory Perception

    • 1062 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Kirby, G. R. & Goodpaster, J. R. (2007). Thinking (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ:…

    • 1062 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    She used the speech shadowing method. Through switching the given stimuli from ear to ear, her experiment demonstrates how we can pay attention to information from both ears and not just one ear. Instead of a filter, Treisman claims that an attenuator is responsible for identifying stimulus based on physical properties or by meaning. We do not completely factor out information we receive from one channel, rather the attenuator lowers the volume of other sources of information in order to attend to a single source of information. After inputs reach the attenuator, grammatical structure and meaning are processed. The inputs will be omitted when the unattended ear can not process a full analysis of the given information, meaning that we often only remember physical characteristics like the sound of someone’s voice rather than the actual meaning of the words. This theory successfully accounts for the cocktail party syndrome and poses less problems than the Broadbent theory.…

    • 725 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays