SENSATION AND PERCEPTION

This chapter focuses on the nature of sensation and perception. Many classifications of sensory systems exist, distinctions are made between five sensory modalities: vision, audition, olfaction, gustation, and somasthesis. The study of sensation and perception involves not only the anatomy and physiology of the sensory systems but also behavioral measures of perception. Psychophysical data obtained from tasks in which observers are asked to detect, discriminate, rate, or recognize stimuli provide information about how the properties of the sensory systems relate to what is perceived and acted on. The sensory information must be interpreted and organized by the higher-level processes, which include mental representations, decision making, and inference. Signal detection methods are powerful tools for investigating basic and applied problems involving sensation, perception and many other areas in which an observer's response must be based on probabilistic information, such as visual inspection of X-ray images of passenger baggage or modeling user behavior toward phishing attacks.