"Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment."
This field examines the mechanisms by which our brains process and interpret information from our senses.
Sensation and perception: The fundamental concepts in sensory and perception that involve understanding of the ways in which we receive information from the environment and process that information.
Thresholds and signal detection: The minimum amount of stimuli required to trigger a response in the brain and the ability to detect signals amongst background noise.
Attention: The ability to selectively focus on specific stimuli in the environment, filtering out other stimuli and improving our perceptual processes.
Adaptation: The ability to adjust our perceptual processes to changes in the environment, allowing us to function better in constantly changing conditions.
Neural processing: The neural structures and pathways that are involved in processing visual, auditory, tactile and other types of sensory information.
Perception and senses: The ways in which we perceive and interpret various forms of sensory information, such as color, texture, shape, length, etc.
Vision: The physiology and anatomy of the human visual system, including the eye, retina, optic nerve, and brain.
Hearing: The physiology and anatomy of the human auditory system, including the ear, cochlea, auditory nerve, and brain.
Touch: The physiology and anatomy of the human tactile system, including skin, muscles, tendons, and the somatosensory cortex.
Smell and taste: The physiology and anatomy of the human olfactory and gustatory systems, including the nose, tongue, olfactory bulb, and gustatory cortex.
Disorders and diseases: The various disorders and diseases that can affect sensory and perceptual processes, including blindness, deafness, color blindness, synesthesia, and amnesia.
Perception and cognition: The ways in which sensory and perceptual processes interact with cognition, including attention, memory, learning, and decision-making.
Development and aging: The changes that occur in sensory and perceptual processes over time, from early childhood to old age.
Culture and perception: The ways in which culture and social context can influence sensory and perceptual processes, including differences in perception of color, shape, and spatial orientation.
Applied issues: The practical applications of sensory and perceptual research in fields such as medicine, technology, and design.
Visual perception: Visual perception is the ability to interpret and organize visual information from the environment. It includes recognizing shapes, colors, and patterns, and perceiving depth and distance.
Auditory perception: Auditory perception is the ability to process and interpret sound information. This includes recognizing different tones and pitches, identifying different sounds, and locating the source of a sound.
Olfactory perception: Olfactory perception is the ability to perceive and recognize different smells. It helps us to identify different scents and respond to changes in the environment.
Gustatory perception: Gustatory perception is the ability to perceive and recognize different tastes. It helps us to identify different flavors of food and beverages.
Somatosensation: Somatosensation is the ability to perceive and interpret physical sensations such as touch, pressure, and temperature. It includes skin sensation and sensory nerves throughout the body.
Proprioception: Proprioception is the ability to sense the position and movement of the body. It helps us to maintain balance and coordination.
Vestibular perception: Vestibular perception is the ability to sense our body's position in space as it relates to gravity. It includes our sense of balance and coordination.
Pain perception: Pain perception is the ability to sense and interpret different types of pain. It includes acute and chronic pain, as well as the perception of pain in different parts of the body.
Time perception: Time perception is the ability to perceive and measure the passage of time. It helps us to keep track of time and to coordinate our activities.
Social perception: Social perception is the ability to interpret and understand social cues and behaviors. It includes recognizing emotions, facial expressions, and body language, as well as understanding social norms and expectations.
"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."