Dr: Amir Abdel-Raouf El-Fiky.
What is Perception? “Perception is our sensory experience of the world around us and involves both the recognition of environmental stimuli and actions in response to these stimuli. Through the perceptual process, we gain information about properties and elements of the environment that are critical to our survival. Perception not only creates our experience of the world around us; it allows us to act within our environment.”
The Perceptual Process: The perceptual process is a sequence of steps that begins with the environment and leads to our perception of a stimulus and an action in response to the stimulus.
The Environmental Stimulus “The world is full of stimuli that can attract our attention through various senses. The environmental stimulus is everything in our environment that has the potential to be perceived.”
The Attended Stimulus “The attended stimulus is the specific object in the environment on which our attention is focused.”
Image (on retina) Upside down Brain (neural processing) Transduction conscious awareness of the stimuli recognition Categorize, interpret Action
Why Do Things Look the Way They Do? Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, said that the great question of perception is: “Why do things look the way they do?” Koffka’s question does not have to be limited to the sense of vision. The same question could be adapted to the other senses.
Sensation is the raw data of experience. Perception, on the other hand, is the organization and the meaning we give to primitive information. It can be said with some degree of confidence that we use sensory information to create a psychological world. geographical world (actual world “out there”) psychological world (the world “in here”)
The Gestalt Laws: -Figure-ground perception. - The ability to distinguish a figure from a field, is an inborn organizing tendency. - Various illusions demonstrate that figure-ground perception is reversible under some conditions.
The Gestalt laws are also traditionally called innate tendencies: First, proximity refers to the nearness of the elements that make up a perception. Second, similarity refers to characteristics that elements have in common. Third, closure is the tendency to fill in gaps in information and make a perceptual object into a complete whole. Fourth, common fate exists when all of the elements of a perceptual object move or act together.
Learned Aspects of Perception: It is important to appreciate that learning also plays a role in perception. The Gestalt laws may play a primary role, but learning certainly plays a secondary, and important, role. Cognitive learning, learning in which consciousness plays an important role, is an important aspect of the perceptual process.
I LLUSIONS : W HAT D O T HEY T EACH U S ABOUT P ERCEPTION ? - An illusion is a false perception, a perception that does not fit an objective description of a stimulus situation. - It is important to distinguish the concept of an illusion from a delusion and a hallucination.
The vase-faces illusion.
There are four kinds of extrasensory perception: (1) Precognition (2) Telepathy (3) Clairvoyance (4) Psychokinesis