perception (redirected from Human perception)

perception, in psychology, mental organization and interpretation of sensory information. The Gestalt psychologists studied extensively the ways in which people organize and select from the vast array of stimuli that are presented to them, concentrating particularly on visual stimuli. Perception is influenced by a variety of factors, including the intensity and physical dimensions of the stimulus; such activities of the sense organs as effects of preceding stimulation; the subject's past experience; attention factors such as readiness to respond to a stimulus; and motivation and emotional state of the subject. Stimulus elements in visual organization form perceived patterns according to their nearness to each other, their similarity, the tendency for the subject to perceive complete figures, and the ability of the subject to distinguish important figures from background. Perceptual constancy is the tendency of a subject to interpret one object in the same manner, regardless of such variations as distance, angle of sight, or brightness. Through selective attention, the subject focuses on a limited number of stimuli, and ignores those that are considered less important. Depth perception, considered to be innate in most animals, is produced by a variety of visual cues indicating perspective, and by a slight disparity in the images of an object on the two retinas. An absolute threshold is the minimal physical intensity of a stimulus that a subject can normally perceive, whereas a difference threshold is the minimal amount of change in a stimulus that can be consciously detected by the subject. Recent studies have shown that stimuli are actually perceived in the brain, while sensory organs merely gather the signals. William Dobelle's research, for instance, has offered significant hope for the blind.

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perception

Process of registering sensory stimuli as meaningful experience. The differences between sensation and perception have varied according to how the terms are defined. A common distinction is that sensations are simple sensory experiences, while percepts are complex constructions of simple elements joined through association. Another is that perception is more subject to the influence of learning. Though hearing, smell, touch, and taste perceptions have all been explored, vision has received the most attention. Structuralist researchers such as Edward Bradford Titchener focused on the constituent elements of visual perceptions, whereas Gestalt psychology has stressed the need to examine organized wholes, believing humans are disposed to identifying patterns. Visual objects tend to appear stable despite continually changing stimulus features (such as ambient light, perspective, ground vs. figure arrangement), which enables an observer to match a perceived object with the object as it is understood to exist. Perceptions may be influenced by expectations, needs, unconscious ideas, values, and conflicts.

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perception

1. Biology the process by which an organism detects and interprets information from the external world by means of the sensory receptors

2. Law the collection, receipt, or taking into possession of rents, crops, etc.

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Perception

Those subjective experiences of objects or events that ordinarily result from stimulation of the receptor organs of the body. This stimulation is transformed or encoded into neural activity (by specialized receptor mechanisms) and is relayed to more central regions of the nervous system where further neural processing occurs. Most likely, it is the final neural processing in the brain that underlies or causes perceptual experience, and so perceptionlike experiences can sometimes occur without external stimulation of the receptor organs, as in dreams.

In contemporary psychology, interest generally focuses on perception or the apprehension of objects or events, rather than simply on sensation or sensory process. While no sharp line of demarcation between these topics exists, it is fair to say that sensory qualities are generally explicable on the basis of mechanisms within the receptor organ, whereas object and event perception entails higher-level activity of the brain. See Hearing (human), Sensation, Vision

Since objects or events are not experienced only through vision, the term perception obviously applies to other sense modalities as well. Certainly things and their movement may be experienced through the sense of touch. Such experiences derive from receptors in the skin (tactile perception), but more importantly, from the positioning of the fingers with respect to one another when an object is grasped, the latter information arising from receptors in the muscles and joints (haptic or tactual perception). The position of the parts of the body are also perceived with respect to one another whether they are stationary (proprioception) or in motion (kinesthesis), and the position of the body is experienced with respect to the environment through receptors sensitive to gravity such as those in the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear. Auditory perception yields recognition of the location of sound sources and of structures such as melodies and speech. Other sense modalities such as taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), pain, and temperature provide sensory qualities but not perceptual structures as do vision, audition, and touch, and thus are usually dealt with as sensory processes. See Olfaction, Pain, Proprioception

Constancy

By and large, these perceptual properties of objects remain remarkably constant despite variations in distance, slant, and retinal locus caused by movements of the observer. This fact, referred to as perceptual constancy, is perhaps the hallmark of perception and more than any other, serves to characterize the field of perception.

Examples of perceptual constancy are: size (except at very great distances, an object appears the same size whether seen nearby or far away, although the size of its image on the retina can be very different); shape (a circle seen from the side is perceived as a circle, although it appears as an ellipse on the retina); orientation (objects appear to keep the same orientation in space, independently of the orientation of the observer's head); and position (a fixed object remains perceived as stationary even when its image on the retina moves because of eye or head movements).

A central problem is whether the perception of properties such as form and depth is innately determined or is based on past experience. By “innate” it is meant that the perception is the result of evolutionary adaptation and thus is present at birth or when the necessary neural maturation has occurred. By “past experience” it is meant that the perception in question is the end result of prior exposure to certain relevant patterns or conditions, a kind of learning process. Despite centuries of discussion of this problem, and considerable experimental work, there is still no final answer to the question. It now seems clear that certain kinds of perception are innate, but equally clear that past experience also is a determining factor. See Intelligence