CHAPTER 5
Sensation and Perception
STANLEY COREN
85THE PERCEPTUAL PROBLEM 86
SENSATION, PERCEPTION, REASON,
AND COGNITION 87
PHYSICS AND VISUAL PERCEPTION 90
PHYSIOLOGY AND PERCEPTION 93
THE SCIENCE OF ILLUSION 99
THE RISE OF THE BEHAVIORAL LABORATORIES 101
THE PSYCHOPHYSICISTS AND THE
CORRESPONDENCE PROBLEM 103
THE GESTALTISTS AND THE CORRESPONDENCE
PROBLEM 105
THE PROGRESS OF PERCEPTUAL RESEARCH 106
BIBLIOGRAPHY 107
REFERENCES 108The study of sensation and perception is diverse. Partly this is
the result of the length of time that perceptual problems have
been studied. The Greek philosophers, the pre-Renaissance
thinkers, the Arabic scholars, the Latin Scholastics, the early
British empiricists, the German physicists, and the German
physicians who founded both physiology and psychology
considered issues in sensation and perception to be basic
questions. When Alexander Bain wrote the first English text-
book on psychology in 1855 it was entitled The Senses and
the Intellect,with the most extensive coverage reserved for
sensory and perceptual functions. During the first half of his
career, the major portion of both the theorizing and the em-
pirical work of Wilhelm Wundt (who is generally credited
with the founding of experimental psychology) were oriented
toward sensation and perception.
The long history of sensory and perceptual research means
that there is a huge database and that much information has
accrued about the substantive issues concerning how the spe-
cific sensory systems operate and how we extract and inter-
pret information from them. It would be possible to write a
book just on the history of visual perception, or another on
auditory perception, or yet another on the history of sensory
and perceptual studies of the tactile, olfactory, or gustatory
modalities. Even specific aspects of perception, such as the
perception of pain, could generate its own full volume out-
lining the history of the major substantive findings and theo-
retical treatments of this single aspect of sensory experience.
In addition to the large empirical database that has resulted
from the long history of research in this area, the study of
perception has been affected by many “schools” of thought.
Each has its own major theoretical viewpoint and its own par-
ticular set of methodological techniques. Thus, we encounter
psychophysicists, gestaltists, functionalists, structuralists,
transactionalists, sensory physiologists, analytic introspec-
tionists, sensory-tonic theorists, “new look” psychologists,
efferent theorists, cognitive theorists, information processors,
artificial intelligence experts, and computational psycholo-
gists, to name but a few. There are even theorists (such as
some behaviorists) who deny the existence of, or at least deny
our ability to study, the conscious event we call perception.
How, then, can a single chapter give any coherent treatment
of the issues associated with this fundamental aspect of
psychology?
Fortunately, a broad overview shows that it is possible to
see some unifying perspectives that have evolved through
history. Common theoretical perspectives might be expected
in this discipline, since most sensory and perception re-
searchers are not exclusively bound to one sensory modality.
Thus, we find Helmholtz and Hering studying both vision
and audition, and George von Bekesy, who won the Nobel
Prize for his work on hearing, also contributing to studies on
vision and touch. Some researchers, such as Fechner,
Stevens, Ames, Gibson, Wertheimer, Koffka, Helson, and
others, have offered theoretical frameworks that are virtually
modality independent and can be tested and explored using
visual, auditory, or any other stimulus input. This is not to
deny that there are issues that are important to a single sen-
sory modality that do not generalize. One instance of a