Vision and Perception
Introduction to Psychology
Perception and sensation play a major role in our everyday lives. We need both perception and sensation to manage our interactions with everything around us. Of particular importance is our ability to sense and perceive sight. Without vision, we would not be able to see anything around us and without perception we could not interpret what we were seeing. Microsaccades are an important function of our eye’s ability to pick up what is around us and let us see our world. The present article is an overview of how these things come into play in our daily activities.
Sensation is the process in which sensory receptors and the nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from the environment (Myers, 2011). Our sensory receptors include our five senses; touch, taste, sight, sound and smell, and the parts of the body that allow us to do those five things. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting the sensory information, which makes us recognize objects and events (Myers, 2011). How we take in the information from our sensory receptors and interpret them is our perception. Sensation and perception are connected because without sensation, there is nothing to perceive. We touch with our hands, smell with our noses, without sensations we would not be able to interpret those senses. We need both sensation and perception to interact with the world around us, and in that sense both sensation and perception are related. The two differ in what actions they carry out for us, both basically complete a two-step process. The senses gather information, and the perception interprets it all.
Our visual system is the sensory area in the occipital lobe of the brain that allows us to see. Light, which we know as color, travels in a form of a wave. A wave is pieces of energy or particles (photons) and moves as waves. Waves can exist above and below the