The sensory experience of the world is what we call perception. It entails both recognizing and reacting to stimuli in the environment.
We learn about the properties and elements of our environment through the perceptual process. A person’s perception not only determines how they perceive the world around them, but also determines how they act in that environment.
What is perception?
Touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste are among the five senses that make up perception. They include the ability to detect changes in body positions and movements, also known as proprioception. Processing information such as recognizing a friend or smelling something familiar requires cognitive processes.
All of the sensations you experience every second, from the computer screen’s glow to the room’s smell to your ankle’s itch, are processed through perception. As a result of the sensory impressions, we receive from the stimuli in the world around us, our perceptions are formed. In order to traverse the environment and make decisions about everything, including which T-shirt to wear or how fast we should run away from a bear, perception is essential.
Types of Perception
Perception manifests itself in a wide variety of ways, including:
- Vision
- Touch
- Sound
- Taste
- Smell
We can perceive reality like equilibrium, time, bodily location, speed, and thoughts and feelings using our other senses. Many of these are multimodal in nature, involving multiple sensory modalities. Cultural aspect, or the ability to perceive and apply social clues about people and relationships, is another critical aspect of perception.
Process of Perception
In the perceptual process, stimuli in the environment trigger a series of steps that lead to our interpretation of those stimulus signals. This process occurs hundreds of thousands of times a day, usually without our awareness. Simply put, an unconscious process is one that occurs without awareness or purpose. Since your brain has already interpreted the light falling on your retinas from the object in front of you as “computer,” you do not need to tell it to do so. You do not need to tell your brain that it is “cold” when you step outside on a chilly night because the stimuli trigger the processes and categories automatically.
Selection
It is impossible to pay attention to everything in the world around us because our brains do not have the resources. In other words, what we pay attention to is the first step in perception. We may focus on a familiar stimulus or something new, depending on the environment and on us as individuals. As soon as we focus our attention on a particular aspect of our environment, it becomes the attended stimulus.
Organization
It is our brain’s choice (consciously or unconsciously), once we decide to pay attention to something in the environment. The activation of our sensory receptors is the beginning of this neural process (touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing). We construct a mental representation of a stimulus (or in most cases a group of related stimuli) called a percept in our brains as a result of neural activity transmitted by the receptors. What is called “multistable perception” is the ability to translate an ambiguous stimulus into multiple percepts that are experienced one at a time.
Interpretation
As we pay any attention to a sensation and our brains receive and arrange the content, we analyze it depending on our prior knowledge of the environment. In Simple words, interpretation includes the process of translating perceived and organized information into something that can be classified. For example, in the previously mentioned Rubin’s Vase illusion, some people will interpret the sensory information as “vase,” while others will interpret it as “faces.” This happens thousands of times per day unconsciously. We can better understand and respond to the world around us by categorizing different stimuli.
The perceiving process enables you to engage and view the world around you in an effective and appropriate manner.
Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization/Grouping Laws of Gestalt
The Gestalt laws of grouping are a set of psychological principles developed by Gestalt psychologists to explain how humans naturally perceive stimuli as organized patterns and objects. Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws that control our ability to obtain and maintain purposeful perceptions in an evidently chaotic world. The core assumption of Gestalt psychology is that the mind is a global entity with self-organizing abilities. The gestalt phenomenon refers to the human brain’s ability to produce full shapes, especially when it comes to visual perception of large figures, rather than merely collections of simpler and unrelated pieces.
Essentially, gestalt psychology claims that our brain combines elements together rather than maintaining them separately whenever possible.
The Law of Similarity
Similar things are grouped together according to the law of similarity. Visual and auditory stimuli can both be grouped. On the basis of their visual texture and resemblance, we can distinguish between adjacent and overlapping objects.
The Law of Proximity
Things that are close together appear to be more related than things that are separated by a greater distance, according to the law of proximity.
This allows elements to be grouped together into larger sets, reducing the number of smaller stimuli that must be processed. As a result, instead of a large number of individual dots, people tend to see clusters of dots on a page. Instead of processing a large number of smaller stimuli, the brain groups the elements together, allowing us to comprehend and conceptualize information faster.
The Law of Prägnanz/Law of Good Figure
The law of prägnanz is also known as the “good figure” or “simplicity” rule. When faced with a group of ambiguous or complex objects, this law states that your brain will simplify them as much as possible. For example, rather than seeing many more complicated shapes, we see the image below as a series of circles.
The Law of Continuity
According to the law of continuity, points linked by straight or curved lines are shown in the easiest way conceivable. In other words, elements in a line or curve appear to be more connected than those placed at random.
The Law of Closure
We perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they appear to complete some entity, according to the law of closure. Our brains are notorious for ignoring contradictory information and filling in blanks.
The Law of Figure-Ground
The figures (the objects that stand out) and the ground (the objects that fade into the background) can be separated in a visual field. This perceptual tendency is exploited by many optical illusions.
The Law of Common Region
When elements are located in the same closed region, we perceive them as belonging to the same group, according to the Gestalt law of the common region.
The Gestalt laws of perceptual organization are a set of concepts that can be used to better understand how perception works. Perception and how we see the world are still being studied by researchers. These organizational principles have a role in perception, but it’s also crucial to realize that they can sometimes lead to erroneous worldviews.
References-
Cherry, K. (2020b, July 9). What is Perception? Verywellmind.
