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Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" [1] or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the ...
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses [ 1 ] were traditionally identified as such (namely sight , smell , touch , taste , and hearing ), many more are now recognized. [ 2 ]
Stimulation, in general, refers to how organisms perceive incoming stimuli. As such it is part of the stimulus-response mechanism. Simple organisms broadly react in three ways to stimulation: too little stimulation causes them to stagnate, too much to die from stress or inability to adapt, and a medium amount causes them to adapt and grow as they overcome it.
Fechner noticed in his own studies that different individuals have different sensitivity to certain stimuli. For example, the ability to perceive differences in light intensity could be related to how good that individual's vision is. [2] He also noted that how the human sensitivity to stimuli changes depends on which sense is affected.
Communication between receptors in this fashion enables discrimination and the more explicit interpretation of external stimuli. Effectively, these localized graded potentials trigger action potentials that communicate, in their frequency, along nerve axons eventually arriving in specific cortexes of the brain.
Tactual perception gives information regarding cutaneous stimuli (pressure, vibration, and temperature), kinaesthetic stimuli (limb movement), and proprioceptive stimuli (position of the body). [18] There are varying degrees of tactual sensitivity and thresholds, both between individuals and between different time periods in an individual's ...
Therefore, the difference in perception of seeing, hearing, and touch is not caused by differences in the stimuli themselves but by the different nervous structures that these stimuli excite. For example, pressing on the eye elicits sensations of flashes of light because the neurons in the retina send a signal to the occipital lobe .
The receptors which react to the stimulus and initiate the process of sensation are commonly characterized in four distinct categories: chemoreceptors, photoreceptors, mechanoreceptors, and thermoreceptors. All receptors receive distinct physical stimuli and transduce the signal into an electrical action potential.