"Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment."
How the brain interprets sensory information to create our experiences of the world around us.
Sensation: The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.
Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events.
Bottom-up processing: Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information.
Top-down processing: Information processing that is guided by higher-level mental processes, such as expectations or knowledge.
Thresholds: The point at which a stimulus is detectable half the time, also called the absolute threshold.
Signal detection theory: A theory predicting how and when we detect weak signals (stimuli) amid background noise.
Adaptation: The weakening of a sensory response over time in response to a constant stimulus.
Transduction: The conversion of one form of energy into another, such as the transformation of light waves into neural impulses.
Gestalt psychology: An approach that emphasizes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, emphasizing the importance of perceptual organization.
Visual system: The collection of visual pathways and brain regions responsible for processing visual information.
Depth perception: The ability to perceive the relative distance of objects in space.
Color vision: Color perception is the ability to perceive light waves that differ in wavelength as having different colors.
Auditory system: The collection of pathways and brain regions responsible for processing auditory information.
Sound localization: The ability to detect the location of a sound in space.
Haptic perception: The use of touch and other sensations to explore and understand the environment.
Multisensory integration: The process by which multiple sensory inputs are combined by the brain to produce a single perception.
Attention: The process by which we selectively focus on certain sensory inputs while ignoring others.
Consciousness: Our awareness of ourselves and our environment, which can be influenced by perception.
Illusions: Perceptual experiences in which stimuli are different from reality, causing a discrepancy between sensory input and perception.
Visual perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of visual stimuli, such as colors, shapes, and patterns, through the eyes.
Auditory perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of sound waves, such as speech and music, through the ears.
Tactile perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of touch sensations, such as pressure, temperature, and texture, through the skin.
Olfactory perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of smells, through the nose.
Gustatory perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of taste sensations, such as sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, through the tongue.
Proprioception: The ability to sense the position and movement of one's own body parts without relying on visual cues, through receptors in the muscles, tendons, and joints.
Vestibular perception: The ability to sense the position, movement, and orientation of the head and body in space, through the inner ear.
Interoception: The ability to sense the internal state of the body, such as hunger, thirst, and pain, through various receptors in the organs and tissues.
Time perception: The ability to perceive and measure the passage of time, through the brain's internal clock mechanism and various external cues.
Social perception: The ability to interpret and make sense of other people's thoughts, feelings, and intentions, through various cues such as facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.
"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."