【Sensation】 ,  【percept】 ,  【sense-datum】 ,  【sensum】 ,  【image】  can denote the experience or process which is the result of the activity of a sense organ and its associated neural structures.

【Sensation】  (see also  【SENSATION】 2 ), the most general of these terms, is applicable to a specific awareness (as of heat, pain, or odor) resulting from adequate stimulation of a sensory receptor by a stimulus from without or within the body, whether this awareness enters fully into consciousness or not; specifically it means an impression received by a sensory end organ (as the retina of the eye, the taste buds of the tongue, or the tactile corpuscles of the skin) or by a combination of such end organs.

【Percept】 ,  【sense-datum】  , and  【sensum】 are technical terms especially of epistemology that are subject to widely varied interpretation, but that typically denote a strictly individual and personal neural event occurring centrally in response to sensory stimulation and constituting an immediate unanalyzable private object of 【sensation】 .

【Image】  (see also  【IMAGE】 1 ) applies to a 【sensation】 that results in a mental representation of the thing seen, the sound heard, and the odor smelled and in the retention of that mental representation in the memory.

【Image】 also refers to a mental representation that can be evoked in the mind in the absence of the thing represented; in this case, the term may apply to a mental representation that is in the memory as a result of previous sense experience or that is a construction of the imagination or fancy out of various bits of sense experience or as a result of a verbal description.