"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 experience and interpret the world around us.
Sensation and Perception: Sensation refers to the process by which our senses collect data from the environment around us, while perception refers to the way our brains interpret and organize this data in order to make sense of it.
Attention: Attention refers to the mental process of selectively focusing on specific aspects of the environment while ignoring others. Attention can be both voluntary and involuntary.
Learning and Memory: Learning and memory involve the processes by which we acquire and retain new information, and how we recall and use that information.
Language and Communication: Language and communication involve the cognitive processes related to language acquisition, comprehension, and expression.
Emotion and Motivation: Emotion and motivation refer to the cognitive and physiological processes that underlie our feelings and behaviors, including our ability to experience pleasure, pain, and other emotions.
Perception and Action: Perception and action involve the integration of sensory information with motor responses, allowing us to interact with the environment in purposeful ways.
Consciousness and Awareness: Consciousness and awareness refer to the subjective experience of our mental and physical states, including the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world around us.
Social Cognition: Social cognition involves the cognitive processes related to our ability to understand and interact with others, including our ability to read emotions, infer intentions, and navigate social situations.
Neural and Hormonal Mechanisms: Neural and hormonal mechanisms involve the physiological processes that underlie perception and cognition, including the roles of neurotransmitters and hormones in modulating behavior.
Clinical Psychology: Clinical psychology involves the application of knowledge gained through research in perceptional psychology to the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and other psychological disorders.
Sensation: The process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.
Perception: The process by which we organize and interpret sensory information, transforming it into meaningful representations of the world.
Attention: The ability to focus on specific stimuli in the environment while ignoring others, and to shift focus when appropriate.
Memory: The ability to retain and retrieve information over time, including both sensory information and higher-level representations.
Language: The ways in which our perceptual systems support the comprehension and production of spoken and written language.
Emotion: The role of perception in shaping our emotional experiences, including the ways in which our perception of social cues influences our emotional reactions.
Cognitive Development: How perceptual processes change and develop over the course of our lifespan.
Perception and Action: The relationship between perception and the control of movement, including the ways in which perception contributes to our ability to navigate the world.
Neuropsychology: The study of the brain basis of perception and behavior, including the ways that damage and disease to the brain can affect perception.
"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."