What are the attributes of sensation?

Edward Bradford Titchener, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Edward Bradford Titchener answers

The attributes of sensation are those aspects of a conscious process without which the process itself cannot exist. Each attribute is inseparable from the sensation it belongs to: a sensation stripped of any one of them is not a diminished sensation — it is nothing at all.1 Let me be precise about the list. A sensation, as I define it, is an elementary mental process constituted of at least four attributes: quality, intensity, clearness, and duration.2

Some sensations carry a fifth, extent, but these four are essential to every sensation without exception. Quality is the most fundamental. It is what distinguishes every elementary process from every other — the attribute that gives a sensation its individual name: cold, blue, salt, a musical a.3 Intensity is the attribute by which we say one sensation is louder or fainter, heavier or lighter than another of the same quality; sensations of the same quality may stand at different points on a finite scale of degrees, from a lower limiting value up to a maximum.4

Clearness determines a sensation's place in the field of consciousness: the clearer sensation is dominant and outstanding, the less clear is subordinate, lost in the background.5 Duration is the temporal attribute — the rise, poise, and fall of the process as it runs its course in consciousness.6 Extent stands apart as an attribute present in some sensations but not all.

Visual and cutaneous sensations invariably possess it — no point of coloured light is so small as to have no length or breadth, no needle-prick so fine as to affect no extent of skin — whereas a tone, however much volume it may seem to carry, does not fill space and cannot be compared as to size.7 Now, the attributes are independently variable, within limits.

The intensity of a tone may be altered while its quality remains the same; the duration may be shortened or prolonged without changing the pitch.8 But this independence is relative, not absolute: beyond certain limits the variation of one attribute carries with it a concomitant variation of another, and the separation of the two becomes, if possible at all, an act of analytical effort rather than a simple observation.9

Quality is, among all these, the core. Intensity is always the intensity of a certain quality; duration is always the duration of a certain quality. A musical a may vary in loudness and in duration, yet it remains a, distinct from every other tone. A blue may appear as a flash or as a broad illumination, as a point or a surface, but its blueness differentiates it from every other visual sensation.10

It is quality, then, that constitutes the sensation as an elemental conscious process — the attribute that makes it irreducibly itself.

Sources

  1. If any one of them disappears, the whole sensation disappears with it.
    An Outline of Psychology
  2. A sensation, as the term is used in this book, may be defined as an elementary mental process which is constituted of at least four attributes, — quality, intensity, clearness and duration.
    A Text-book of Psychology
  3. Quality is, so to say, an individual attribute; it is the attribute which distinguishes every elementary process from every other. It is, accordingly, the attribute which gives a sensation its special and distinctive name: cold, blue, salt, /^^, — these are all names of sensation qualities.
    A Text-book of Psychology
  4. Intensity is the attribute to which we refer when we say that a given sensation is brighter or duller, louder or fainter, heavier or lighter, stronger or weaker, than another sensation... these two sensations, of the same quality, lie at two different points upon a finite scale of sensation degrees, which begins at a lower limiting value and rises to a maximum.
    A Text-book of Psychology
  5. Clearness, again, is the attribute which gives a sensation its particular place in a consciousness: the clearer sensation is dominant, independent, outstanding, the less clear sensation is subordinate, undistinguished in the background of consciousness.
    A Text-book of Psychology
  6. duration is, as its name implies, a temporal attribute; it is the attribute which makes the course of a sensation in time — its rise, poise and fall as process in consciousness — characteristically different from the course of another sensation.
    A Text-book of Psychology
  7. No point of coloured light is so small that it has no length or breadth: and no needle-prick is so fine that it does not affect some extent of skin. Extent is an invariable property of visual and cutaneous (skin) sensations.
    An Outline of Psychology
  8. I may strike it gently or roughly. In each case, the 'tone' remains the same, the quality is that of the musical a; but the tone produced by the second blow is louder, more intensive... Again: I may let the tone 'run down' or 'ring off'... The tone is still the same; its duration differs.
    An Outline of Psychology
  9. Absolutely true, however, the statement is not. In certain cases and beyond certain limits the variation of one attribute implies the concomitant variation of another; and in extreme instances the separation of the two can be effected, if at all, only by a sort of...
    Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention
  10. An a in music may vary in loudness and in duration; but it is still a, and therefore different from all the other tones... A blue may show itself as a flash or as a permanent illumination; it may be a point or a broad colour surface: but its blueness differentiates it from all other visual sensations.
    An Outline of Psychology