Blog Post #7

Sensation is the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment. It is our five senses: hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, and smelling. If you touched a stove that was hot, your sense of touch would receive stimuli and you would feel heat and pain. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events. It is what can be concluded from the information received from our senses. We can figure out what an object is without looking at it by using our other senses. We can feel and smell an object and know what it is. This is because of perception, the informaition from the receptors was organized and interpreted.
I thought the visual cliff experiment was interesting. A visual cliff is a laboratory device for testing depth perception in infants and young animals. It was concluded that crawling infants can perceive depth because even when being coaxed by their mother, they wouldn't crawl onto the glass. It was interesting that newborn animals with virtually no experience, also don't venture onto the glass. It's amazing that such young beings have depth perception. This supports the nature side of the argument, saying children and animals are born with it. Although seem to be born with depth perception, it grows with age and people becom wary of heights.
An article I found interesting was "Psychology of Magic: 3 Critical Techniques." The article talked about why psychologists are interested in and study magic. Psychologists are interested in the principles of magic because magicians carry out behavioral experiments on people. This is also interesting to me. Then the article explained three techniques used in magic. The first one is pychological misdirection. The magician will point out an object or something appears that distracts the viewers from a movement that is critical for the trick. The second technique is cognitive illusions which can fool our attention and play with the way we predict the future. People often try to predict the future and magicians use this to their advantage such as in the disappearing coin tricks. The third technique is mental forcing, which is when a magician gives the spectator the impression that they have a free choice but then uses a technique to expose an object to the spectator for longer, influencing their decision. This is used in card games where the magician tries to guess the card a spectator has picked. Magic is very interesting to me. I always wonder how magicians do their tricks and this article was interesting because they explained some of the techniques magicians use. The only thing it would change is how I would go about watching a magic trick. Now I know a few methods used during a trick and would be watching for them. This applies to my life if I would go to a magic show. It also applies if I was trying to convince someone to choose something I wanted or if I wanted to influence them in some way. If someone was also trying to trick me, maybe I would be able to figure it out.