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Dimensions of sensing

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Sensation, perception and affect: what’s the difference?

To understand how we ‘sense’, we need to distinguish the parts of this multi-layered process, starting with the base of it all: Sensation, Perception and Affect

Sensation

The process by which we receive information from the environment.

Perception

The process of selecting and identifying information from the environment.

Affect

How we are impacted – physically and emotionally – by sensing and perceiving this information.

Information is provided by a stimulus from our environment:
  • Light
  • Sound
  • Chemicals
  • Pressure
  • Temperature
  • Pain
The sensory stimuli can:
  • take several forms (e.g. air vibrations, gases, chemicals, tactile pressures)
  • affect our sensory systems in different ways (light intensity = brightness, wavelength = hue)
  • be limited by our sensory receptors’ range (e.g. types of light waves and sound frequencies)
Want to know more about the science of the Sensory and Perceptual processes?
Show more on the Sensory and Perceptual Processes

The sensory process

Sensory processes are necessary before perception can occur. Let’s use the example of a freshly made cup of tea to example.

  • Energy of a stimulus (the very hot from cup) is sensed by the temperature receptors in your hand.
  • This message is passed along, as electrically-charged signals that respond specifically to that hot temperature, to the nerve centre in your spine.
  • These signals are converted into what is called ‘neural activity‘ (or Transduction).
  • Therefore, like your computer carries out complex functions by reading binary code (1s and 0s), the stimulus from the cup in your hand is recoded as a neural pattern, so that it can be read by your brain and understood as ‘hot’.

Our ability to transmit and read these signals differs from other people and can change over time:

  • The signals can be affected by and adapt to our experiences and – for example, you adapt to the lower temperatures of Greenland if you lived there.
  • A constant level of stimulus can also result in a decreased response over time – the feeling of shooting pains from sciatica may be muted for someone experiencing them as chronic pain.

The perceptual process

Information from the environment is perceived and interpreted so that we can identify its meaning:

  • Where sensation usually involves sensing the existence of a stimulus, perceptual systems involve the determination of what a stimulus is.
  • Importantly, our existing knowledge about the world allows us to make fairly accurate predictions about what should be there, so we don’t need a lot of information from the stimulus itself.

We perceive in a couple of ways:

  • Bottom-up processes are processes that are involved in identifying a stimulus by analysing the information available in the external stimulus.
  • Top-down processes are processes that are involved in identifying a stimulus by using the knowledge we already possess about the situation.
    • This knowledge is based on past experiences and allows us to form expectations about what we ought to perceive.

Watch ‘Sensation vs Perception: What’s the Difference‘ for more information on these concepts.

Psych Explained ‘Sensation vs Perception: What’s the Difference’ – Dr. Kushner (Live transcript available on YouTube)

Personalising sense

There are ‘scientifically generally agreed’ sensory features of all things that we can use.

The language we use for this may differ, but these measurements suggest a scientifically determined objective metric – something is ‘100g’ and ’30 degrees Celsius’.

However, it’s important to remember that everyone’s understanding of sense is personal and cultural, and therefore can – and will – differ.

Evaluative vs Evocative

There is an important distinction between our ‘perceptions’ of the senses (Evaluative sensory readings) and how they ‘affect’ us (Evocative sensory readings).

So while our perception helps us to detect and understand the sensation, we also respond to how the sensation it affects us. This affect can be a physical and/or emotional.

Let’s take an example to see this in practice:

  • A sound is playing on a speaker, which is picked up by your sound sensory system (sensation stimulus)
  • You hear it, and perceive it as a song, as people are singing and playing musical instruments (perception)
  • It makes you want to dance and sing along (physical affect)
  • It brings back happy memories of your school discos (emotional affect)

Describing sense

Understanding the difference between these aspects can help us to describe, illustrate and share the nuances of observed and personally-experienced senses in collections records and interpretation.

We can help separate the two by thinking about the following, when writing, talking, drawing or using any other preferred communicative method, to explain the senses.

Evaluative

Your assessment about the sensory potential of the collections

3rd person writing

“there is a red shine to it“

Evocative

Your (or someone else’s) personal sensory experiences of the collections

1st person writing

“it made me feel sick“

Context and temporality

Two fundamental framing tools for sensational thinking are the concepts of ‘context’ and ‘temporality’

They situate sensory encounters – which will differ depending on what’s happening, how they are being approached, who or what is there, and when.

As with any genre of storytelling and communication, context and time can come in many forms.

Below, Andrew Hinton, and Joanne Greenhalgh and Ana Manzano provide some great reflections on how they understand these two concepts.

Andrew Hinton,’The Machineries of Context’, 2009: 45-7

For most of human history, spatial context has been fairly straightforward. You’re either here, or you’re over there. You’re either at the office, or at the bowling alley. You’re on the stage of a theater with a hundred people watching you, or you’re wearing your bathrobe in your kitchen, scrambling eggs.

For a long time we’ve been able to conveniently rely upon the alignment of a given space’s context to the physical material that bounds the space. I could look around my house, and seeing walls, a roof and a space devoid of a hundred people staring at me, I could reassure myself that I was not on a theatrical stage, and go about making my eggs in peace.

In fact, we’ve relied on this assumption that physical boundaries and human context are aligned for so many millennia that it’s ingrained in our culture, our language, our deepest bodily assumptions about how reality works.

But as we move forward, keep this idea in mind: context is just the mental map that we’ve layered on top of our sensory experience. A kitchen only matters as a kitchen because we call it that, and we use it as such. A theater is a theater in any meaningful way only when it is understood as such, called a theater, and used as a theater.

The world we walk around in, live in together, talk about and use together, has contextual relevance because of the information we share about that world.

Context can also be a function of time. Just as a cathedral may have been a place of worship but is now an ironic discotheque, your college-self might have been a sophomorically rebellious punk, but now you’re a more responsible, mellow professional. The few college friends who remain in contact have changed along with you, and the ones who stayed that way have drifted into the fog of your past, separated by the inertia provided by time and space.

Greenhalgh and Manazano give us two useful ways for thinking about ‘context’ and its relationship with ‘time’.[1]

Observable features (space, place, people, things) that triggered or blocked the situation.

context operates at one moment in time and sets in motion a chain reaction of events.

Relational and dynamic features that shaped the mechanisms through which the intervention works.

context operates in a dynamic, emergent way over time at multiple different levels of the social system.

Framing collections

How do we then think about context and time in relation to heritage collections?

  • Context is the framing of connected interactions between people, places, things and situations
  • Temporality is both the point in time (when in the past, present or future) and the duration (e.g. 2 seconds, 1000 years)

To make it a little easier, we can break down context and temporality into the following categories:

In what situation are you encountering the item?

This is perhaps the easiest to work with and covers both context (what’s happening) and time (when).

  • writing a book at your solid oak desk in the winter of 1808.
  • buying a softback copy in a bookshop in summer 2019 for your holiday

Where are you encountering this item?

  • at Stone Henge on Solstice as the sun rises
  • watching a documentary on Druid culture featuring Stone Henge

Over what timeframe is this happening?

  • 1000 years
  • 2 seconds

Is this an actual encounter?

  • you are sat in a cafe drinking tea for an afternoon

Or an imagined encounter?

  • you are thinking about the senses in an artwork of someone drinking tea in a cafe

Are you trying to sensorially situate yourself in a setting?

  • thinking about how would feel to walk up a steep hill in 19th century climbing boots

Or are you engaging with the sense in a disconnected setting?

  • watching a hill-climbing documentary at your desktop

Is it something you are imagining somebody experiencing?

  • what it would feel like to rethread looms in a 19th-century cotton mill

Or are you recalling your own experience?

  • crafting your own piece of embroidery with cotton thread

A sensational example

In this example we are going to be thinking about a sword across different contexts and times

Forged in 9th-century Wessex

  • Space: in a dark and hot iron forge in autumnal England
  • Duration: this would have taken several day to get to the quality for combat, but only during daylight hours
  • Encounter: This is an imagined situation, as you did not forge the sword and are not in 10th-century England
  • Immersion: You are imagining yourself hammering the metal into shape, and the energy and actions it would take to do this.
  • Experience: You have tried forging before, so can recall aspects such as the heat, pain, sounds etc.

Stuck in a riverbed for a millennium

  • Space: lay lengthways on the bed of the River Severn
  • Duration: 1000 years in this position
  • Encounter: you have to imagine what might have happened over time that led it to end up in the water and to progressively be submerged and covered by large amounts of debris over 1000 years
  • Immersion: you have to immerse yourself in a few situations – the process of dropping the sword, the slow movement to bury the sword under the debris and how much it encountered over those years, and the process of unearthing the sword to end its 1000 years in the river.
  • Experience: it is hard if not impossible for you to conceive the passing of 1000 years in that position, but you can compare it riverbed burial to a time you got your foot stuck in your local river when you were a child.

In a museum exhibition in 2025

  • Space: In a mounted display case, with the tip pointing to the groud, you can only see one side, and it is in a gallery space with many other pieces of medieval armour
  • Duration: this is about much time you are about to spend time in the space with the sword
  • Encounter: instead of thinking of the use of the sword, you are in closer contact with it and considering it in its curated place in a museum – what is placed next to it, how it is protected, the lighting around it, how you have to crane your neck to see up the length of it
  • Immersion: you are observing it in this curated space, as well as thinking about what is around you and it.
  • Experience: you are experiencing it as you consider the sensory properties in this context.

For something a little more complex: An exact replica used in an episode of Game of Thrones

  • Space:
    • EITHER in the scene where the king uses the sword in battle
    • OR viewing the episode on your flat screen with surround sound at home (both can happen simultaneously)
  • Duration: during the time it is shown on screen – on and off for 10 minutes
  • Encounter:
    • EITHER imagining you are in the battle scene and how you might sense that
    • OR how it is portrayed on screen and what you notice as you watch the episode
  • Immersion:
    • EITHER immersed in a sense of the battle and how it might feel to use the sword
    • OR observing how it is being wielded by the character and the way it is being portrayed as a tool in the storyline.
  • Experience:
    • EITHER empathising with the sensory realities of this war (pain, weight, smells, emotions)
    • OR experiencing how the episode has been constructed as a piece of entertainment and how watching and listening to it makes you feel.

[1] Joanne Greenhalgh and Ana Manzano, ‘Understanding “Context” in Realist Evaluation and Synthesis’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 25, no. 5 (2022): 583–595 – available at: doi:0.1080/13645579.2021.1918484