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Discovery of Sensation and Perception from TV drama From the word ‘psychology, ‘psycho refers to ‘psyche’ which nearness ‘mind’, ‘soul’, ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’; and ‘logy refers to ‘study of or ‘research’ (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001). And according to Andrew (2009), psychology defined as treats of the soul’. And I define psychology as knowledge which enables us to interpret a person’s mood and thought by observing his or her motion. For example, when a person tells lies, he or she may have petty actions (e. G. Diddling with hair, scratching their nose or continuously changing his sitting posture). Also, I think psychology is a study that allows us to understand and predict a person’s action by reviewing his or her family history, childhood nightmare or big events in his life. For instance, a boy loved his girlfriend a lot, unfortunately his girlfriend died, and some of the organs of that girl were transplanted to some of the patients. Since the boy didn’t want the others to possess her girlfriends’ organs or tissues, therefore he killed people who received the organs, and became a serial killer.
And by applying skills learned in psychology, by revising the events happening around the boy, the reason of killing and the boys ext target can be deduced. Actually, topics included in psychology are much more than I expected, and the topic that intrigues me the most is sensation and perception. According to David (2004), sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses response to stimuli from the surroundings, and perception is a superior brain function about comprehending events and objects around the world.
I remembered in a previous lecture of Tomorrows Leader, professors had shown us a video related to an awareness test. In the video, eight people are divided into 2 teams (the white team and the black team) to play basketball. And students were asked to count the number of passes made by the white team. At that time most of the students can count the number of passes accurately. However, most of us missed something in the video, which is a moonwalk bear passing by when the two teams are passing the balls (Test of awareness, 2008).
And after the lecture of sensation and perception, I understood the theory behind. This is an example of ‘selective attention’. When we were watching the video, most of the students were focusing on the ball passing by white team, therefore the ball and members of white am are the selected aspects of the environment, and blocking out of the moonwalk bear. Also, I found the theory of difference thresholds is interesting. I remembered a TV drama I had watched before which calls ‘The season of fate’ produced by TAB in 2010.
In episode 14 of the drama, a chief was asked to try five bowls of soup, and each bowl of soup increased with saltiness. The chief was asked to compare the first and the second bowl of soup, next the second and third and so on. And every time when the chief compare the two bowls of soup, he couldn’t find any big difference. Finally, he was asked to compare the first bowl and the last bowl of soup, this time he can find that the last bowls was much more salty then the first bowl (The season of fate, 2010; Episode 14, 2013).
The above case should be an example of difference threshold. As the first bowl of soup possessed salt, the threshold was then not equaled to zero. Hence, the saltiness continuously to be increased, the difference of saltiness also cannot be detected. It may be due to the difference in saltiness (stimulation) is too small to be reliably detected when two bowls of soup (stimuli) are compared. And when impairing the first and the last bowl, the difference can be identified easily as the difference in saltiness (stimulation) is big enough to be reliably detected.