The Importance Of Perception

Great Essays
What is Perception? Is what you perceive reality?
Introduction
Perception is a process by which we organise, integrate and recognise stimuli in order to make sense of the world through meaning and interpretation. Perception begins when the human brain receives data from body’s five senses touch, sight, taste, smell and hearing. Knowledge and experience are extremely important for the concept, perception, this is because they help us make sense of the input to our sensory system. Without being able to organise and interpret sensations, life would be just black and white, meaningless. Most of the time, what we perceive as our reality is what we want to perceiver but, this is not always the because sometimes our perception of our reality is
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Psychologist Richard Gregory believes that perception is a positive process which depends on Bottom-up processing ‘perception is a hypothesis Gregory (1970). Perception involves making influences about making influences about what we see and try to make the best guess out of it. When we look at something, we develop a perceptual theory, which is based on the knowledge that we already have. Richard Gregory believes that our perceptions of the world are theories based on previous experiences and stored information as a lot of hypothesis testing to make sense of the information presented to the sense organs. Bottom-up processing is also known as data-driven processing, this is because perception arises with the stimulus itself. Processing conveys from one direction of retina (back of the eye) to the visual cortex and with each successful stage the visual pathway carries out more complex analysis of the input. We take in a lot of information from our eyes however Gregory stated that 99% of the information gets lost before reaching the brain. Gregory 1970 uses three types of examples to support his evidence; they are: ‘highly unlikely objects tend to be mistaken for likely objects’, ‘perceptions can be ambiguous, and ‘perception allows behaviour to be generally appropriate to non-sensed object …show more content…
J. (1972). A Theory of Direct Visual Perception. In J. Royce, W. Rozenboom (Eds.). The Psychology of Knowing. New York: Gordon & Breach.
• Gibson, J. J.(1966).The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston:Houghton Mifflin.
• Gregory, R. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• McLeod, S. A. (2007). Visual Perception Theory. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/perception-theories.html
• Suicide on campus and the pressure of perfection. (2015, July 27). New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?_r=0
Pictures
• https://www.tes.com/lessons/ITkqJeHFdc7shQ/sensation-perception

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