Perception
Define
-Perception can be defined as our recognition and interpretation of sensory information. Perception also includes how we respond to the information. We can think of perception as a process where we take in sensory information from our environment and use that information in order to interact with our environment. Perception allows us to take the sensory information in and make it into something meaningful.
Meaning Perceptions vary from person to person. Different people perceive different things about the same situation. But more than that, we assign different meanings to what we perceive. And the meanings might change for a certain person. One might change one's perspective or simply make things mean something else.
Explanation
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.
Perception includes the five senses; touch, sight, taste smell and taste. It also includes what is known as proprioception, a set of senses involving the ability to detect changes in body positions and movements. It also involves the cognitive processes required to process information, such as recognizing the face of a friend or detecting a familiar scent.
Factors that influence Perception Include
Individual Factors
Research show that the individual Factors are important in perception. This includes such factors as motivations, expectations, Emotions, values and attitudes. People can perceive things in the way they want to see them.
The Object
Contrast means how well things stand out. We notice things which stand out.
Intensity: Things which are loud stand out
Motion: Moving objects stand out.
Repetition: Things which are repeated are notice.
Context
Context is a strong influence since no information is received in a vacuum.
Selection
The world around us is filled with an infinite number of stimuli that we might attend to, but our brains do not have the resources to pay attention to everything. Thus, the first step of perception is the (usually unconscious, but sometimes intentional) decision of what to attend to. Depending on the environment, and depending on us as individuals, we might focus on a familiar stimulus or something new. When we attend to one specific thing in our environment—whether it is a smell, a feeling, a sound, or something else entirely—it becomes the attended stimulus.
Organization
Once we have chosen to attend to a stimulus in the environment (consciously or unconsciously, though usually the latter), the choice sets off a series of reactions in our brain. This neural process starts with the activation of our sensory receptors (touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing). The receptors transduce the input energy into neural activity, which is transmitted to our brains, where we construct a mental representation of the stimulus (or, in most cases, the multiple related stimuli) called a percept. An ambiguous stimulus may be translated into multiple percepts, experienced randomly, one at a time, in what is called "multistable perception."
Interpretation
After we have attended to a stimulus, and our brains have received and organized the information, we interpret it in a way that makes sense using our existing information about the world. Interpretation simply means that we take the information that we have sensed and organized and turn it into something that we can categorize. For instance, in the Rubin's Vase illusion mentioned earlier, some individuals will interpret the sensory information as "vase," while some will interpret it as "faces." This happens unconsciously thousands of times a day. By putting different stimuli into categories, we can better understand and react to the world around us.
Managing the perceptual process
Attribution
The link between this process and perception is quite simple: people rarely perceive behavior; they infer causes at the root of behavior. People’s interpretation if behavior goes beyond the actual behavior, they tend to interpret the cause or intention of the behavior. If they can interpret the cause of behavior, they feel they understand the situation better.
Kelley (1980) notes the existence of both internal and external attributions, or causes. People determine the causes of behavior both in themselves and in others by:
(a) Internal attribution: Behavior is due to a person’s own skill, ability or talent, for example Joanne is successful because she works very hard.
(b) External attribution: Behavior is due to chance, ease of situation or aid given, for example Frank passed his driving test because the driving instructor was extremely lenient.
Three factors come into play when we attempt to ‘read’ causes in the behavior we perceive: consensus, consistency and distinctiveness. Take, for example, two children in a classroom situation, both exhibiting loud behavior. The teacher perceives Claire in a far more negative light than Tom. Why?
The teacher’s attribution process is at work. She is assigning causes to each child’s behavior-remember we do not perceive behavior as much as behavior which is caused. The teacher assigns an internal, almost deliberately negative cause, to Claire, that Claire is being rowdy because she enjoys being disruptive, while Tom is assigned an external cause, that Tom is being rowdy because the rest of the class is also being noisy. Claire is deliberately annoying; Tom is being influenced by others. How is this attribution arrived at ? The teacher is using the three attribution factors.
a) Consensus: The extent to which a group member is acting in accordance with the group.
b) Consistency: The extent to which the observed person behaves in the same way in this, and other similar, situations.
c) Distinctness: The extent to which the observed individual behaves idiosyncratically when faced with different situations.
If we go back to Claire and Tom:
Claire is rowdy, regardless of her companions’ behavior. She is always rowdy in this teacher’s class. In fact, she is rowdy in every situation, whether in class, at home or in the playground.
Tom is rowdy because the whole class is rowdy. His behavior tends to be influenced by the general class behavior. He tends not to be disruptive in any other area of life, whether at play or at home.
Attribution theory has important implications within a organizational setting. Where management attributes poor performance levels to internal causes, for example Daniel is not performing well because he is not motivated, employee-management relationships may suffer. It may well be the case that Daniel is performing poorly merely because he does not experience adequate resource back up.
It is interesting note that when we make attributions about ourselves we claim internal attributions for positive results, for example I won the lottery because I used my family’s birthdays for numbers, and external attributions for negative outcomes, for example I didn’t win because the numbers were all low and therefore unusual.
We have seen that an individual’s perceptual world is far from simple. There are many interrelating variables influencing our view of our world. If the process of viewing the environment is fraught with difficulties, is the process of viewing the environment is fraught with difficulties, is the process of viewing other people also complex? We now examine what is involved when all the components of the perceptual process are targeting another individual, known as social perception.