Sensation and Perception, Attention and Awareness

Sensation and Perception

Example 1

• Sensation – utilizing one’s visual sensors to distinguish a moving tail and a furred face of an animal.
• Perception – utilizing the brain’s capability to interpret the input information to spot a joyful dog.

Example 2

• Sensation – utilizing one’s hearing sensors to detect a loud grumble that can be heard from a significant distance.
• Perception – utilizing the brain’s capability to recognize the rumble of thunder and connect the image to the real world.

Example 3

• Sensation – utilizing one’s skin receptors to feel a warm sensation on the bottom of the feet.
• Perception – utilizing the brain’s capability to interpret the pleasant feeling and visualize warm beach sand under one’s feet.

Example 4

• Sensation – utilizing one’s smell receptors to distinguish molecules of a familiar aroma.
• Perception – utilizing the brain’s capability to ‘remember’ the chicken on the grill and its exceptional smell.

Example 5

• Sensation – utilizing one’s taste buds to record an unpleasant sensation that is linked to a yet unknown food source.
• Perception – utilizing the brain’s capability to transfer the signal from the marrow to one’s mouth to spit out a portion of spoiled food.

Attentional control

There are two types of attention that can be pointed out from the literature on the subject. Sasin and Fougnie (2021) suggest that bottom-up and top-down attention represent an essential dichotomy that cannot be ignored if one expects to pick up every stimulus or achieve the goals. In the case of top-down attention, the process of collecting information occurs voluntarily. As for bottom-up attention, a person might redirect their efforts when affected by salient stimuli (Riddle et al., 2019). Therefore, such an approach represents a response to unexpected impetuses that, nonetheless, force the individual to resort to their experience. Table 1 can be examined for a list of examples related to both bottom-up and top-down attention categories.

Table 1. Examples of bottom-up and top-down attention.

Bottom-Up	Top-Down
Driving around and paying attention to detail to find the best routes and memorize the location	Looking at the map to see the best possible route and pointing out the most important details of the route prior to departure
Cooking a complex meal with lots of ingredients for the first time and following the given recipe	Experimenting with ingredients of a known recipe that can be altered to help the person achieve a different result with identical ingredients
Preparing for an exam by repeating all the information from scratch	Preparing for an exam paying attention only to the topics that are either complex or completely forgotten
Visiting a supermarket for the first time and going through the isles to build a bigger picture of where to find certain products	Go straight to the required isles to pick necessary products and find the shortest route to save time and avoid compulsive purchases
When composing a bouquet, the person (a professional florist, for example) pays attention to how every flower would affect the composition and create the best image	The person visits an open field and collects all the flowers they can see without paying attention to what kind of flowers they take in order to set them to order a bit later

References

Lyyra, P., Astikainen, P., & Hietanen, J. K. (2018). Look at them and they will notice you: Distractor-independent attentional capture by direct gaze in change blindness. Visual Cognition, 26(1), 25-36. Web.

Murphy, G., & Murphy, L. (2018). Perceptual load affects change blindness in a real‐world interaction. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(5), 655-660. Web.

Riddle, J., Hwang, K., Cellier, D., Dhanani, S., & D’Esposito, M. (2019). Causal evidence for the role of neuronal oscillations in top–down and bottom–up attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 31(5), 768-779. Web.

Sasin, E., & Fougnie, D. (2021). The road to long-term memory: Top-down attention is more effective than bottom-up attention for forming long-term memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1-9. Web.