Sensation And Perception: Sensory Thresholds

After reading through the introduction chapter of my psychology book, perception and sensation, I concluded that I was not aware how our perception about things took effect and how we as humans could perceive things and act upon. The first section of the chapter, The Perceptual Process, outlined how the perceptual process works in our brains. When acting towards objects that occur in front of us whether they are small or big, it all begins with the lens of our eye and how a person quickly perceives the object. The principle of representation states that everything a person perceives is based not on direct contact with stimuli but on representations of stimuli that are formed on the receptors and the resulting activity in the person’s nervous
The absolute threshold is defined as the smallest stimulus level that can just be detected and the difference threshold being defined as the smallest difference between the two stimuli that enables us to tell the difference between them. Reading this definition, I did not fully understand what the author meant. A website that I came across that helped me to better understand the thresholds was called “Sensation and Perception: Sensory Thresholds and Psychophysics”. An example that this website gave was having a hearing test done testing out your absolute thresholds. Personally, I have never had a hearing test done, but reading this example made it easier for me to understand what an absolute threshold was and how it worked. A hearing test is done by hearing many different pitches of tones through a pair of earphones. You are given a button to press when you hear the tone and then release when it goes away. The intensity in which you “lose” and regain the tone is where your absolute threshold comes into play. Weber defined the difference threshold with a formula called Weber’s Law in which I have seen and used before. Delta I which is the difference threshold over I meaning the initial intensity before the change, and k defined as the Weber’s constant. The smaller the outcome of the number, the better you can discriminate small differences or how sensitive