Coding of Sensory Information

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION provided the starting points for modern research into our mental processes. In the early nineteenth century the French philosopher Auguste Comte argued that the study of behavior should become a branch of the biological sciences and that the laws governing the mind should be derived from objective observation. Comte's new philosophy, which he called positivism, was influenced by the British empiricists John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, who maintained that all knowledge is obtained through sensory experience—from what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. At birth, Locke proposed, the human mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience leaves its mark.