William James on Sensation and Perception

Abstract

Beginning with an analysis of a famous quotation from James’ Principles, this essay details some of the highlights of James’ treatment of sensation and perception. The primary source is a chapter on discrimination and comparison, in which emphasis is placed on the way people react to difference and sameness, reactions that may be fundamental to the psychophysical methods developed by Fechner and to later techniques, such as stimulus scaling and signal detection procedures, as well as to recent methods (preferential looking and habituation-dishabituation) for investigating perception in human infants. One can see considerable continuity between many of the issues raised in the Principles and those that have been addressed by perceptionists over the ensuing century, but James seems not to have had the direct impact in this domain that he has had, for example, on current conceptions of emotional processes. His associationist and functionalist positions may find contemporary expression in the seemingly disparate approaches known as connectionism and ecological psychology.