Perception
In
psychology and the
cognitive sciences,
perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing
sensory information. Methods of studying perception range from essentially
biological or
physiological approaches, through
psychological approaches to the often abstract '
thought-experiments' of
mental philosophy.
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 approaches.
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.
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.
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.
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Pareidolia*
Apophenia*
Autopoiesis*
Sensory Neuroscience
