1 Psychology and human development1.1 Sensation and perception
1.1.3 Sensory modalities and body awareness
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
New in the 2027 syllabus
The College added this topic for exams from January 2027.
Sensing the body and its surroundings
Modality | What it tells you | Receptors or structures |
|---|---|---|
Vestibular sense | Head rotation, linear acceleration and gravity | Semicircular canals and otolith organs |
Touch | Pressure, vibration and skin stretch | Mechanoreceptors in the skin |
Temperature | Warming and cooling | Thermoreceptors |
Nociception | Actual or potential tissue damage | Nociceptors |
Proprioception | Position and movement of body parts | Muscle spindles, tendon and joint receptors |
Interoception | Conditions inside the body | Visceral and bodily afferent signals |
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. It is not the same as nociception: the amount of nociceptive activity and the pain a person reports have no fixed one-to-one relationship.
Interoception is sensing what is happening inside the body, such as breathing, heartbeat and visceral states. Proprioception is different: it is about body position and movement.
Chemical senses
Smell (olfaction): receptors in the olfactory epithelium detect molecules carried in the air. Adaptation makes you less aware of a smell that continues.
Taste (gustation): taste receptor cells tell apart sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
Flavour combines taste with smell, texture and temperature. This is why food seems different when the nose is blocked.
Visual qualities
Colour coding starts with three classes of cone. Colour signals then go through opponent processing, where they are compared in opposing pairs.
Contrast depends on how a patch differs from the luminance (brightness) or colour around it. So an unchanged patch can look different against another background.
Shape: the brain does not read the retinal image as a complete object. It builds shape by combining boundaries, orientation and spatial relationships.