Final answer:
The experiment's goal is to explore how external and internal noise affects perceptual enhancement, emphasizing the significance of motivation and attention in our ability to discriminate important stimuli from background noise, which has broad implications for fields like air traffic control.
Step-by-step explanation:
The purpose of the experiment looking at how external/internal noise affects perceptual enhancement is to understand how different types of noises influence our ability to detect and process meaningful sensory stimuli. This experiment contributes to a broader project by assessing the factors influencing perceptual enhancement and determining the significance of motivation and attention in this process. Understanding these relationships is crucial, especially in real-world scenarios where the ability to focus and detect important signals can be life-saving, such as the case with air traffic controllers. Motivation can shift our ability to discriminate between a true sensory stimulus and background noise, as can the significance of the stimulus itself—a phenomenon described by signal detection theory. Furthermore, attention plays a critical role in what we perceive, which is evident when we focus our attention away from distracting noises to concentrate on a conversation, making us unaware of background music or other auditory stimuli that we would otherwise notice. Thus, this experiment is relevant to perceptual psychology and has practical applications in various fields including safety, engineering, and technology.