Perception

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search Psychology Portal History Areas Wikiproject RESEARCH Abnormal Biological Cognitive Developmental Emotion Experimental Evolutionary Mathematical Neuropsychology Personality Positive Psychonomics Psychophysics Social Transpersonal APPLIED Clinical Educational Forensic Health Industrial/Org School Sport LISTS Publications Topics Therapies view talk

Neuropsychology

Topics Brain-computer interfaces Brain damage Brain regions Clinical neuropsychology Cognitive neuroscience Human brain Neuroanatomy Neurophysiology Phrenology Common misconceptions Brain functions arousal attention consciousness decision making executive functions language learning memory motor coordination perception planning problem solving thought People Arthur L. Benton David Bohm Antnio Damsio Kenneth Heilman Phineas Gage Norman Geschwind Elkhonon Goldberg Donald Hebb Alexander Luria Muriel D. Lezak Brenda Milner Karl Pribram Oliver Sacks Roger Sperry H.M. Tests Bender-Gestalt Test Benton Visual Retention Test Clinical Dementia Rating Continuous Performance Task Glasgow Coma Scale Hayling and Brixton tests Lexical decision task Mini-mental state examination Stroop effect Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Wisconsin card sorting task Mind and Brain Portal This box: view talk edit In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was proclaimed that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, but, needless to say, that is still very far from reality. The word perception comes from the Latin perception-, percepio, , meaning "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses." --OED.com. Methods of studying perception range from essentially

biological or physiological approaches, through psychological approaches through the philosophy of mind and in empiricist epistemology, such as that of David Hume, John Locke, George Berkeley, or as in Merleau Ponty's affirmation of perception as the basis of all science and knowledge. There are two basic theories of perception: Passive Perception (PP) and Active Perception (PA). The passive perception (conceived by Ren Descartes) is addressed in this article and could be surmised as the following sequence of events: surrounding - > input (senses) - > processing (brain) - > output (reaction). Although still supported by mainstream philosophers, psychologists and neurologists, this theory is nowadays losing momentum. The theory of active perception has emerged from extensive research of sensory illusions with works of Professor Emeritus Richard L Gregory in a lead. This theory is increasingly gaining experimental support and could be surmised as dynamic relationship between description (in the brain) < - > senses < - > surrounding.

Contents
[hide]

1 History of the study of percepti on 2 Percept ion and reality 3 Percept ion-inaction 4 Percept ion and action 5 Types of percepti on 6 Percept ion in fiction 7 Referen ces and further reading 8 Externa l links 9 See also

[edit] History of the study of perception

Perception is one of the oldest fields within scientific psychology, and there are correspondingly many theories about its underlying processes. The oldest quantitative law in psychology is the Weber-Fechner law, which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of physical stimuli and their perceptual effects. It was the study of perception that gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approach. .

[edit] Perception and reality

Ambiguous images Many cognitive psychologists hold that, as we move about in the world, we create a model of how the world works. That is, we sense the objective world, but our sensations map to percepts, and these percepts are provisional, in the same sense that scientific hypotheses are provisional (cf. in the scientific method). As we acquire new information, our percepts shift, thus solidifying the idea that perception is a matter of belief. Abraham Pais' biography refers to the 'esemplastic' nature of imagination. In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally not perceive it. This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage, and also in biological mimicry, for example by Peacock butterflies, whose wings bear eye markings that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator. Perceptual ambiguity is not restricted to vision. For example, recent touch perception research (Robles-De-La-Torre & Hayward 2001) found that kinesthesia-based haptic perception strongly relies on the forces experienced during touch. This makes it possible to produce illusory touch percepts (see also the MIT Technology Review article The Cutting Edge of Haptics). Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This (with reference to perception) is the claim that sensations are, by themselves, unable to provide a unique description of the world. Sensations require 'enriching', which is the role of the mental model. A different type of theory is the perceptual ecology approach of James J. Gibson. Gibson rejected the assumption of a poverty of stimulus by rejecting the notion that perception is based in sensations. Instead, he investigated what information is actually presented to the perceptual systems. He (and the psychologists who work within this paradigm) detailed how the world could be specified to a mobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of information about the world into energy arrays. Specification is a 1:1 mapping of some aspect of the world into a perceptual array; given such a mapping, no enrichment is required and perception is direct. dhanesh

[edit] Perception-in-action
The ecological understanding of perception advanced from Gibson's early work is perception-in-action, the notion that perception is a requisite property of animate action, without perception action would not be guided and without action perception would be pointless. Animate actions require perceiving and moving together. In a sense, "perception and movement are two sides of the same coin, the coin is action." (D.N. Lee) A mathematical theory of perception-in-action has been devised and investigated in many forms of controlled movement by many different species of organism, General Tau Theory. According to this theory, tau information, or time-to-goal information is the fundamental 'percept' in perception.-

[edit] Perception and action

We gather information about the world and interact with it through our actions. Perceptual information is critical for action. Perceptual deficits may lead to profound deficits in action (for touch-perception-

related deficits, see Robles-De-La-Torre 2006).

[edit] Types of perception

Amodal perception Color perception Depth perception Form perception Haptic perception Speech perception Perception as Interpretation Numeric Value of Perception Perceive

[edit] Perception in fiction

Sensation is the fiction-writing mode for portraying a character's perception of the senses. According to Ron Rozelle, . . .the success of your story or novel will depend on many things, but the most crucial is your ability to bring your reader into it. And that reader will be most completely in when you deliver the actual sensations of the many things that comprise your story. (Rozelle 2005, p. 76) As stated by Jessica Page Morrell in Between the Lines, You breathe life into fiction by translating the senses onto the page, producing stories rooted in the physical world . . . that creates a tapestry, a galaxy of interwoven sensory ingredients. (Morrell 2006, p. 172) Also according to Rozelle, The sensation of what something feels like is used to describe everything from sensual pleasure to pain and torture. Its a wide range, and your readers have actually experienced only some of those feelings. So your job is to either make them recall exactly what it feels like when something occurs in your story or, if they havent experienced it, what it would feel like if they did. (Rozelle 2005, p. 86) Morrell describes a sensory surround, which when coupled with drama tugs the reader into [the] story and forces him to keep reading. (Morrell 2006, p. 173) The importance of conveying sensation in fiction is widely accepted. However, recognition of sensation as a distinct fiction-writing mode is a matter of discussion. [1]

[edit] References and further reading

Flanagan, J.R., Lederman, S.J. Neurobiology: Feeling bumps and holes, News and Views, Nature, 412(6845):389-91 (2001). James.J.Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston 1966. James J. Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987. ISBN 0898599598 Hayward V, Astley OR, Cruz-Hernandez M, Grant D, Robles-De-La-Torre G. Haptic interfaces and devices. Sensor Review 24(1), pp. 16-29 (2004). Morrell, Jessica Page (2006). Between the Lines: Master the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books. ISBN 1582973938. Robles-De-La-Torre G. & Hayward V. Force Can Overcome Object Geometry In the perception of Shape Through Active Touch. Nature 412 (6845):445-8 (2001). Robles-De-La-Torre G. The Importance of the Sense of Touch in Virtual and Real Environments. IEEE Multimedia 13(3), Special issue on Haptic User Interfaces for Multimedia Systems, pp. 24-30 (2006).

Rozelle, Ron (2005). Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books. ISBN 158297327X.

[edit] External links

Paradoxical haptic objects. An example of touch illusions of shape. See also the MIT Technology Review article: The Cutting Edge of Haptics, by Duncan Graham-Rowe. Theories of Perception Richard L Gregory

[edit] See also

Find more about Perception on Wikipedia's sister projects: Dictionary definitions Textbooks Quotations Source texts Images and media News stories Learning resources Apophenia Autopoiesis Pareidolia Philosophy of perception Psychophysics Sensory Neuroscience Visual routine Illusion Perceptual constancy Multistable perception Conveyed concept Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception" Categories: Perception | Experimental psychology | Unsolved problems in neuroscience

Views

Article Discussion Edit this page History

Personal tools

Log in / create account

Navigation

Main Page Contents Featured content Current events Random article

Interaction

About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Donate to Wikipedia Help

Search
Go Search

Toolbox

What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Printable version Permanent link Cite this page esky Dansk Deutsch Eesti Espaol Esperanto Franais Hrvatski Interlingua Italiano Lietuvi Nederlands Norsk (bokml)

Languages

Polski Portugus Simple English / Srpski Suomi Svenska Ting Vit Trke

This page was last modified 06:30, 6 February 2008. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers

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.

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 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.

The Image on the Retina

Next, the attended stimulus is formed as an image on the retina. Most people are aware that the image on the retina is actually upside down from the actual image, but this is not terribly important. The image has still not been perceived, and this visual information will be changed even more dramatically in the next step of the process.

Neural Processing
The electrical signals then undergo neural processing. The path followed by a particular signal depends on what type of signal it is (i.e. an auditory signal or a visual signal).

Perception
In the next step of the perception process, we actually perceive the stimulus object in the environment. It is at this point that we become consciously aware of the stimulus.

Transduction
The image on the retina is then transformed into electrical signals in a process known as transduction. This allows the visual messages to be transmitted to the brain to be interpreted.

Recognition
Perception doesn't just involve becoming consciously aware of the stimuli. It is also necessary for our brain to categorize and interpret what it is we are sensing. Our ability to interpret and give meaning to the object is the next step, known as recognition[/b.

Action
The final step of the perceptual process involves some sort of action in response to the environmental stimulus. This could involve a variety of actions, such as turning your head for a closer look or turing away to look at something else.