Proximal stimulus vs distal stimulus

STIMULI CAN BE DEFINED IN EITHER OF TWO DIFFERENT WAYS. In this course we'll adopt the convention that to qualify as a stimulus, an object or event must be describable in physical terms, and must register on a sensory receptor that's able to respond. These two criteria do not completely settle all the details of how to define the stimulus. Consider the energy of a light bulb. There's no doubt that a light bulb can be a stimulus for human vision, but there are several different ways of describing this stimulus (or any other stimulus). One way describes the energy produce by the bulb; another focuses on the portion of the bulb's energy that falls on the receptor surface of the human eye. After all, the argument goes, the energy actually striking the receptors is what does the real job of initiating sensory responses. The first of these approaches defines what is called the distal stimulus. This is the energy emitted by or reflected from some object. A second approach focuses on the energy falling on a receptor surface. This comprises what is known as the proximal stimulus.

The distal stimulus touches on something fundamental to sensory processes and perception. The proximal stimulus actually sets the receptors' responses in motion. To appreciate the distinction between proximal and distal stimuli, imagine that you are looking at a coin. No matter from what angle you view the coin, the coin's physical shape (the distal stimulus) is constant. The coin's shape does not change as you look at it from different angles. But think about the proximal stimulus, the pattern of energy actually falling on your eye's receptors. If you could take a picture of that energy pattern you'd discover that the shape of the proximal stimulus varies as y our angle of regard changes with respect to the coin. As a result, different sets of receptors in your eye are activated depending on your viewing angle. However, your perception of the coin remains constant. The situation has a hint of paradox: perception is invariant even though the proximal stimulus is not. The constancy of the perceptual response despite changes in the proximal stimulus is called perceptual constancy. And constancy is critical for any perceiver. Imagine the evolutionary advantage to any perceiver who achieves constancy and the evolutionary cost to any perceiver who cannot. Constancy allows us to recognize that some object is the same object we've seen or heard or smelled before despite all sorts of irrelevant changes in the proximal stimulus. Constancy, which cannot be explained strictly in terms of proximal stimulation, depends upon additional processing. Like any sensory phenomenon, constancy reflects the nervous system's processing of the proximal stimulus. As a shorthand device, we can call the nervous system's activity neural computations. A computation, whether carried out by an electronic device or by a biological system, is only as good as its data and its processing rules. The brain's perceptual

computations may be accurate or they may be in error, depending on the quality of information supplied by the senses and on the brain's predisposition to process that information in certain ways.