Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

BECOMING AN 
INFORMED CONSUMER
of Psychology
Managing Pain
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124 Chapter 
4 
Sensation and Perception
Whatever the reason for synesthesia, it is a rare condition. (If you’d like to check 
out this phenomenon, see Figure 6.) Even so, the senses of all of us do interact and 
integrate in a variety of ways. For example, the taste of food is infl uenced by its 
texture and temperature. We perceive food that is warmer as sweeter (think of the 
sweetness of steamy hot chocolate compared with cold chocolate milk). Spicy foods 
stimulate some of the same pain receptors that are also stimulated by heat—making 
the use of “hot” as a synonym for “spicy” quite accurate (Balaban, McBurney, & 
Affeltranger, 2005; Cruz & Green, 2000; Green & George, 2004). 
It’s important, then, to think of our senses as interacting with one another. For 
instance, brain imaging studies show that the senses work in tandem to build our 
understanding of the world around us. We engage in multimodal perception, in which 
the brain collects the information from the individual sensory systems and integrates 
and coordinates it (Macaluso & Driver, 2005; Paulmann, Jessen, & Kotz, 2009). 
Moreover, despite the fact that very different sorts of stimuli activate our indi-
vidual senses, they all react according to the same basic principles that we discussed 
at the start of this chapter. For example, our responses to visual, auditory, and taste 
stimuli all follow Weber’s law involving our sensitivity to changes in the strength of 
stimuli. 
In short, in some ways our senses are more similar to one another than different. 
Each of them is designed to pick up information from the environment and translate 
it into useable information. Furthermore, individually and collectively, our senses 
help us to understand the complexities of the world around us, allowing us to nav-
igate through the world effectively and intelligently.