"Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment."
Study of how we receive and interpret sensations from the external world.
Sensory processes: Sensory processes refer to the ways in which the body collects, processes, and interprets sensory information.
Perception and cognition: The relationship between perception and cognition is an important part of phenomenology. The way we interpret and understand sensory information can be influenced by our prior knowledge and experiences.
Gestalt theory: Gestalt theory is a key concept in studying perception. According to this theory, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and our perception is influenced by the relationships between the different elements of a stimulus.
Attention: Attention plays a crucial role in perception, as it determines which stimuli we attend to and which we ignore. Understanding the mechanisms of attention is key to understanding perception.
Perceptual organization: Perceptual organization refers to the way in which we organize sensory information into meaningful patterns and objects.
Perceptual constancy: Perceptual constancy refers to the fact that we perceive objects as stable and unchanging, despite changes in lighting, size or distance.
Illusions: Illusions can be used to understand the ways in which our perceptual system can be fooled or tricked into perceiving things that are not there or that are different from reality.
Neural mechanisms of perception: The neural mechanisms of perception are the underlying processes that drive our perception. Understanding the brain structures and functions involved in perception can give us insight into how our perceptual experience is generated.
Cross-cultural and cross-species perception: Differences in perception across cultures and across species can shed light on the ways in which our perception is influenced by biological, social and environmental factors.
Perception as a subjective experience: At its core, perception is a subjective experience. Understanding the relationship between our perception and our personal experience is critical for a full understanding of phenomenology.
Visual Perception: It refers to the ability to see and interpret the visual information from eyes.
Auditory Perception: It refers to the ability to recognize and interpret sounds or audios from the environment.
Olfactory Perception: It refers to the ability to smell and recognize different odors.
Gustatory Perception: It refers to the ability to taste and recognize different flavors.
Kinesthetic Perception: It refers to the ability of movement and feeling of body parts in space.
Tactile Perception: It refers to the ability to feel different textures and surfaces.
Proprioceptive Perception: It refers to the ability to sense the position and movement of your body parts.
Vestibular Perception: It refers to the ability to sense movement, balance, and orientation of the head and body.
Interoception: It refers to the ability to sense and interpret internal bodily sensations such as hunger, thirst, pain, etc.
Time Perception: It refers to the ability to perceive time, duration, and intervals.
"All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system."
"Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye."
"Smell is mediated by odor molecules."
"Hearing involves pressure waves."
"Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention."
"Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition)."
"A person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as attention) influence perception."
"Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness."
"Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques."
"Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception."
"Sensory neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms underlying perception."
"Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally, in terms of the information they process."
"Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound, smell, or color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the perceiver."
"There is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science, or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary."
"The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying."
"Human and other animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information."
"These different modules are interconnected and influence each other."
"For instance, taste is strongly influenced by smell."
"The study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input."