SENSATION PARTICIPATION

Sensation, Perception, and Attention Paper What is it that we think about when we hear the term sensation, perception, and attention, I know that we usually do not associate them being together in any form? What I have noticed from the readings of the different chapters. When dealing with sensation we look at it as being a feeling of how the receptors and early neural processing stages that responds to stimuli. Perception on the other hand is stimulus-driven process influencing behavior. Finally, we want to take a look at the attention and what does it really means and it is the process of focusing consciousness on a limited range of experience requiring more extensive information processing (Kowalski, R. & Westen D (2009)). If you take a look at sensation, perception and attention as a whole they are all connected in some form. For sensation and perception they are two interrelated areas that have relied on many diverse research methods, including psychophysical, physiological, and computational techniques (Chapter12 Sensation and perception research methods (2003)). The distinctions between sensation, perception and cognition have become increasingly fuzzy, especially with the strong evidence of top-down processes influencing both sensation and perception. Examples include attention modulating physiological activity in lower cortical visual areas and influencing psychophysical measures of basic visual sensitivities (Chapter 12 Sensation and perception research methods (2003)). The popularization of the forced-choice and signal detection methodologies in the mid-1900s gave researchers more objective psychophysical techniques by which to study perception, and computational ways to assess response bias effects separately from participants’ sensitivities (Chapter 12 Sensation and perception research methods (2003)). In many ways, thought is simply an extension of perception and memory. When we perceive, we form a mental representation. When we