Sensation and perception

• Sensations are processed by sensual receptors and this allows us to experience the world around us. In order to understand sensations, though our brain needs to work out what they mean, this is where perception comes in.
• Perception is the organisation and interpretation of sensory information. It is a combination of the information received by our sensory receptors such as the eye and the brains interpretation what the information means.
• We perceive what to do with a chair. This is the brains job to first process information received and then work out what to do with it. The brain uses past experience of what we would normally do with a chair to help us do this.
• The difference between sensation and perception might be summed up as a difference between feeling and thinking.
• Sensation is a body's way of detecting a stimulus in the environment such as light waves or sound waves.
• Perception is how our brain organizes and interprets these sensation
• Not all psychologists think there is a straightforward difference between sensation and perception.
• There are two main theories of perception: gregories constructiveness theory and gibson's direct theory.
• Gregory suggested that there is a clear difference between sensation and perception. He said perception is a combination of stimulus information and the brain using past experience to make sense of the sensations. For instance when we see a chair we know it's okay to sit on because we've seen and sat on chairs before.
• Gibson saw sensation and perception as pretty much the same thing. He argued that the image which reaches the eye contains all the information needed to understand the image that we are looking at. For example, even if we never sat on a chair before we would know what to do because of the visual signals it gives off