Stimulus Sensation & Perception

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Could you help me get some insight into how stimulus, sensation & perception relate to each other in vision.

-- KathySong (kathy.song@unsw.edu.au), March 05, 2002

Answers

These terms have been used in many different ways, though generally speaking, sensations are considered to be less "processed" than percepts. Some philosophers of vision used to say that perception is "sensation plus meaning." This is not a definition used by today's vision scientists, but it captures reasonably well the gist of the difference between them. A sensation might be just a roundish red patch. Once the cognitive system has figured out what might have caused such a sensation, the person says something like "I see (perceive) an apple."

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), March 06, 2002.

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