ABSTRACT
Both sensory psychologists and cognitive psychologists study how intact organisms detect, encode, process, store, and recall information. Yet, in spite of this common interest, there has been, until recently, relatively little interaction between the two groups. For well over a century, sensory psychologists have concentrated their efforts on understanding how patterns of energy initiate sensory activity and how the information available in the discharge patterns of the sensory receptors is used to build up a representation of the external world. To the sensory psychologist, the end product is this representation: the figures we detect, locate, identify, and separate from the background; the voices we hear, the words we recognize; and the objects we touch, smell, and taste. Cognitive psychologists, on the other hand, typically begin to study how information is processed after a perceptual representation has been achieved. To the cognitive psychologist, the stimuli are the seen objects or the heard words. Their interests lie in how, for example, the heard word is stored in memory to be later recalled, and how sequences of words are integrated to extract meaning from a conversation. Thus, cognitive psychologists concentrate on how information is processed after the perceptual representation has been achieved, whereas sensory psychologists concentrate on how the sensory and perceptual systems arrive at that representation.
