Sensation, contributing to the routine fitting and

Sensation, contributing to the routine fitting and

Sensation, Perception, and Attention Every member of this Team has a specific and diverse attention sensation and perceptive process that is affected by his or her surroundings/environment. Sensation is defined as the process of bringing information from the outside world into the brain. This process is passive in a sense that the brain does not have to be engaged in sensing sensation. Perception is defined as the active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting the information brought to the brain by the senses.Our team will conduct a cognitive psychological test also known as dichotic listening and investigate each team members threshold for auditory stimuli. We will also attempt to discover how and why our attention was divided, and gather any relative information about sensory perception.

The auditory threshold is, “The audibility limit of discriminating sound intensity and pitch” (Biology Online, 2005). We hear different pitches throughout every day of our lives and do not realize the kind of range that exists in these sound waves.Through the testing of the members in our group we found varying results in the limits between us. After taking an auditory threshold test online our group discovered that we each started to hear the noise at different points ranging from 20 Hz to 80 Hz.

Each individual experienced the increasing noise, to the point it was uncontrollable, near the end of the test the noise dissipated, and we began to lose the sound around 13kHz-19 kHz.One of the team members showed rare results because of their ability to hear the noise throughout almost the entire test. The results that we found show how much the ability to hear different pitches differs from person to person. We do not encounter needs to examine the auditory threshold of ourselves daily, but it is the important role that this stimuli plays in our lives, which we fail to notice. The study of auditory threshold is more crucial than most people realize, specifically because of the importance of hearing aid technology.

The present study demonstrated the feasibility of the operant procedure combined with a psychophysical method for threshold assessment, thus contributing to the routine fitting and maintenance of cochlear implants within the limitations of a hospital setting” (Da Silva, De Souza, Bevilacqua, Lopes. 2011). As this study shows there are varying degrees of stimuli, and scientists continue to further their research even today. Also known as the “cocktail party” phenomenon, dichotic listening concentrates on an individual’s ability to hear with the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere of the brain.It is thought that most individuals’ left hemisphere is more dominant than the right hemisphere concerning language processing and “for everyone, the left hemisphere also controls right side motor and auditory functions, this means that for most people, a linguistic stimulus sent to the right ear will be processed more rapidly than a linguistic stimulus sent to the left ear because a linguistic stimulus sent to the right ear will be directly processed in the left hemisphere” (University of California, Los Angeles.

n. d. ).A group of six individuals recently completed a dichotic listening test (University of California, Los Angeles. n.

d. ). One individual’s results were inconclusive but the other five individuals were successful in completion of the test. The dichotic listening test completed by the five people (subjects A-E) consisted of listening through a set of headphones to two different words. One word is spoken in the left ear and a different word is spoken in the right ear. The group was allowed to play each word once, and they noted what word they heard.

The individuals that made up this particular group have many variations in age, employment, families, etc. These are the results of the test: Only one individual – subject A*- that had an extremely strong correlation, and it was to the right side; this person comprehended nine out of the 10 words that were heard in the right ear. Subject B* heard six out of 10 words through the left ear. Subject C heard two words correctly and both were from the right ear. The other eight words heard by this individual were not words spoken but were close to the word that was given e. g.

the word given was “glue” in one example but the word that was heard was “true. ” Subjects D and E* both heard five correct words in the right ear and five correct words in the right ear. (* The individual heard one word incorrectly but was close to a word given e.

g. , word given – lime, word heard – line. ) The dichotic listening results reflect that there were three people (A, B, and C) that processed a linguistic stimulus sent to the right ear more rapidly than the left. The remaining two individuals (D and E) process a linguistic stimulus sent equally to the right and the left sides.When a person divides attention between two tasks it can definitely impede learning. For most of us we have learned this by trying to do many hard tasks at once and either doing a mediocre job or failing completely at one of them.

It can be very hard to divide ones attention, especially if the tasks involved are ones that require the persons complete attention. For many people, it can be very hard to listen to music or have the television playing while studying or reading because music will often cause the mind to wander.Diving attention leads to reduced brain activity that is associated with memory. The prefrontal brain region has been long known to reduce memory in learning when attention is divided. Attention, memory, and learning overlap in the brain system that at times causes a person’s brain to ignore completely one stimulus to complete the other task at hand (Sarter & Lustig, 2006). We have only a limited amount of attention to divide into situations, and we often will concentrate on the most stimulating of activities and block out the others.If we are reading a book and our children are watching television, we may be very well blocking the television out until something violent or something inappropriate comes on and it catches our attention.

We are actively reading and absorbing the information and also actively listening to the television. This is much harder with complex tasks, like texting and driving, not only is it hard to watch the road and look at the cell phone keyboard but also our brains are absorbed in the conversation, and we are concentrating on texting instead of our surroundings, like tractor trailers, red lights, rain, and more.Dividing attention can also help the learning process, for example, if someone is trying to learn how to drive a standard vehicle, someone being there to talk them through the steps is most often helpful.

Dividing the attention between these two tasks can help an individual learn the task at hand, but if the task is completely unrelated like trying to text and drive, it can be impossible to be fully capable of completing both. With each team member taking the dichotic listening test and the auditory stimuli test we have different perspectives with each test and the results vary.For example in the first five sets of words given in the dichotic listening test one person heard the words loud, rain, cat, dry, and tall. Comparing those results with another individuals results who heard different words such as dog instead of loud, tap instead of cat, door instead tall, we learn that our brains interpret different sounds and words even when given the same sounds or words.

When trying to distinguish the two words being said at the same time in the dichotic listening test the sensory perception problem involved is the long term memory.In a free recall task, the experimenter presents participants with a list of words one at a time, and asks them to recall as many as possible. When there is a delay between presentation of the list and recall is short, participants demonstrate a phenomenon known as serial position effect, the tendency to remember information toward the beginning and end of a list rather than the middle. When each person takes the listening test, they tend to remember the first or the last word being said depending on their perspective.

With the auditory stimuli test, the sounds we heard varied from one person to the next because not everyone’s hearing is the same. When listening to the audio I first heard the sound at 20 Hz and a fellow teammate started hearing the sound at 40 Hz, the noise finally became unbearable at 200 Hz whereas another teammate may be able to handle the noise to 1 kHz. The way that each person processes and evaluates information is different; the information can be processed differently based on a number of sensory, environmental, and even cultural stimuli.Stimulus like noise, beliefs, and the natural elements can divide our attention enough to distort the message that our brain receives and can change what our perception of that message is.

The more we encounter this outside stimuli, the more our perception of each received message can differ. Our Team effort has shown the different ways that the brain receives messages and how different stimuli can cause different perceptions in each of our team members.? References Biology Online. (2005). Auditory Threshold. Retrieved from http://www. iology-online.

org/dictionary/Auditory_threshold on October 24, 2011. Da Silva, W. R. , De Souza, D. G.

, Bevilacqua, M. C. , Lopes, J. (2011). Operant Measurement of Auditory Threshold in Prelingually Deaf Users of Cochlear Implants: II.

Retrieved from http://www. psycneuro. org/index. php/psycneuro/article/viewFile/123/464 on October 24, 2011.

Kowalski, R. , & Westen, D. (2009).

Psychology (5th ed. ). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Sarter, M. , Lustig, C.

(2006). Attention and Learning and Memory University of California, Los Angeles. n. d.

) A Dichotic Listening Experiment. Retrieved from http://www. linguistics.

ucla. edu/people/schuh/lx001/dichotic/dichotic. html on October 23, 2011. University of California, Los Angeles.

(n. d. ) List of Sound Heard in the Dichotic Listening Experiment. Retrieved from http://www. linguistics. ucla. edu/people/schuh/lx001/Dichotic/dichotic_answers.

html on October 22, 2011. Vatsek. (2007). Hearing Test. Retrieved from http://www. youtube.

com/watch? v=4G60hM1W_mk on October 24, 2011.