Perception

In psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, a goal which is still very far from fruition. The word perception comes from the Latin words perception, percepio, meaning "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses."^[1]

Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. 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. The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approach.

What one perceives is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture, and the interpretation of the perceived. If the percept does not have support in any of these perceptual bases it is unlikely to rise above perceptual threshold.

Types

Two types of consciousness are considerable regarding perception: Phenomenal(any occurrence that is observable) and Psychological. The difference everybody can demonstrate to himself/herself is by the simple opening and closing of his/her eyes: Phenomenal consciousness is thought on average to be predominately absent without sight, for example. Through full or rich sensations present in sight, nothing by comparison is present whilst the eyes are closed bar the remaining other senses, having of course firstly considered sight as the primary human sense. Using this precept, it is understood by a vast majority of cases that the logical solutions, present through Phenomenology in the human mind/body interfacing within reality, are reached through simple human sensation.

Plato's Cave analogy was coined to similarly express these ideas Philosophically or simply termed as practical Phenomena. At this mark of consideration on strengths in sensory data, the Phenomenality of Perception has become Psychological as critiqued herein, in which furthermore there are two basic theories available: Passive Perception (PP) and Active Perception (PA). The Passive Perception (conceived by René Descartes) is addressed in this article, and could be surmised as the following sequence of events: surrounding → input (senses) → processing (brain) → output (re-action). 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, most notably the works of Richard L. Gregory. This theory is increasingly gaining experimental support and could be surmised as dynamic relationship between "description" (in the brain) ↔ senses ↔ surrounding, all of which holds true to the linear concept of experience.

Basic physical truths such as cause and effect and vagrant patterns imposed upon the percieved laws of creation similarly support this dualistic appreciation of Reality/Perception. Please let it be noted that whilst limited understanding of the Self exists, essential characteristics allow full and complete (albeit partial) understanding of Perception through the incompletely understood human vessel.

Additional types include:

Perception and reality

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye^[2]. 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. The question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.

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.

The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with a preconceived idea about it, they tend to take those preconceived ideas and see them whether or not they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. The extent of a person’s knowledge creates their reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that which it has been exposed to. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That which most closely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up what we see when we look at things that we don’t comprehend.^{[citation needed]}

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. ^[3]

Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This (with reference to perception) is the claim that sensation 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 perception.

The brain, with which you perceive the world, is made up of neurons “buzzing” at 50 cycles a second, while the world as it exists in reality, is made up of electro-magnetic radiation oscillating at 500 trillion cycles a second. This means that the human brain cannot nearly keep up with the ‘realness of reality.’ To compensate, the brain takes a preconceived idea about the object, then uses those preconceived ideas to see whether or not they are there. The problem with attaining an accurate perception of reality stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. The extent of a person's knowledge creates their reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that which it has been exposed to. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That which most closely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up what we see when we look at things that we don't comprehend.

Perception-in-action

The ecological understanding of perception go forward 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." One aspect of Gibson's approach has been questioned however: it is his unargued belief that singular entities, which he calls 'invariants', already exist in the real and that all that the perception process does is to home in upon 'them'. A view known as social constructionism (see Ernst von Glasersfeld) regards the continual adjustment of percept and action to the external input as precisely what constitutes the 'entity', which is therefore far from being 'invariant'. In human communication, according to the theory, a running hypothesis that there is an 'invariant', a target to be homed in upon, is a pragmatic necessity to allow an initial measure of understanding to be established prior to the updating a statement aims to achieve, but it does not and need not represent an actuality. It is added that, after all, it is extremely unlikely that what is desired or feared by an organism will never suffer change -- indeed, radical change -- as time goes on; the social constructionist theory thus allows for the needful evolutionary adjustment.^[4]

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.

Theories of Perception

References and further reading

^ From Oxford English Dictionary: The definitive record of the English language
^ Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. (2003), In the mind's eye : the visual impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, pg. 257, Amsterdam: Rodopi, ISBN 9042010355
^ Robles-de-la-torre, Gabriel; Hayward, Vincent (2001), "Force can overcome object geometry in the perception of shape through active touch", Nature, 412 (6845): 445–448, doi:10.1038/35086588
^ Glasersfeld, Ernst von (1995), Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, London: RoutledgeFalmer; Poerksen, Bernhard (ed.) (2004), The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism, Exeter: Imprint Academic; Wright. Edmond (2005). Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.]

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.