1. What Factors Affect Our Perception?

2. Perceptual Set
A state of readiness to perceive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others

3. What could affect your perceptual set?
Expectations
Culture
Emotion
Motivation
i.e. what could affect how likely you are to see / notice things in your environment?
What could affect your perceptual set?

4. Expectation

5. “The cat sat on the map and licked its whiskers”

12. Culture

13. African children prefer the split view (left) as they have not been exposed to side views from western childrens’ books

14. b) Hudson (1960) noted difficulties among South African Bantu workers in interpreting depth cues in pictures. Such cues are important because they convey information about the spatial relationships among the objects in pictures. A person using depth cues will extract a different meaning from a picture than a person not using such cues.
Hudson tested pictorial depth perception by showing participants a picture like the one below. A correct interpretation is that the hunter is trying to spear the antelope, which is nearer to him than the elephant. An incorrect interpretation is that the elephant is nearer and about to be speared. The picture contains two depth cues: overlapping objects and known size of objects. Questions were asked in the participants native language such as:
What do you see?
Which is nearer, the antelope or the elephant?
What is the man doing?

15. Emotion

16. Is the person on the left about to help or hurt the old man?

18. If you’re scared of spiders you might be more likely to perceive one?

19. Activity – Card Sorting
Our brains block out stimuli which might cause anxiety

20. Motivation

21. Thirsty people will estimate a greater volume of lemonade in a glass

22. Children from less wealthy families estimates the size of a coin as being larger than children from wealthy backgrounds

23. Hungry people over-estimated the brightness of a photo of a plate of food