"Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment."
This topic covers how we process and make sense of sensory information.
Sensory Receptors: Sensory receptors are specialized structures that respond to stimuli such as light, sound, or touch and convert them into signals that can be processed by the nervous system.
Sensory Coding: Sensory coding refers to the process by which the nervous system represents and processes sensory information from the environment. It involves the conversion of sensory input into a neural code that can be interpreted by the brain.
Perception: Perception is the process by which the brain interprets and makes sense of the sensory information it receives. Perception involves both top-down (influenced by prior knowledge and context) and bottom-up (driven by sensory input) processing.
Attention: Attention is the ability to selectively focus on one stimulus while ignoring others. It is a crucial component of perception and can be influenced by factors such as motivation, arousal, and cognitive load.
Sensory Adaptation: Sensory adaptation is the process by which sensory receptors become less sensitive to a stimulus over time. This can occur through both neural and perceptual mechanisms and can help to filter out irrelevant information.
Visual Perception: Visual perception involves the processing and interpretation of visual information from the environment, including color, shape, depth, and motion perception. It is influenced by factors such as attention, expectations, and context.
Auditory Perception: Auditory perception involves the processing and interpretation of sound information, including pitch, loudness, and timbre perception. It is influenced by factors such as attention, expectations, and context.
Olfactory Perception: Olfactory perception involves the processing and interpretation of odor information. It is unique from other senses in that smell can directly elicit emotional and memory responses.
Gustatory Perception: Gustatory perception involves the processing and interpretation of taste information, including sweet, salty, sour, and bitter perception. It is influenced by factors such as expectations, culture, and genetics.
Multisensory Integration: Multisensory integration is the process by which the brain combines information from multiple senses to form a single perception. It can enhance perception and facilitate quicker responses.
Vision: Vision refers to the process by which the eyes receive and interpret visual stimuli, allowing individuals to perceive their surroundings and distinguish objects, colors, and shapes.
Hearing: Hearing refers to the process of perceiving and interpreting sound through the ears and the brain.
Touch: The topic of touch in psychology refers to the sensory experience and perception of physical contact and pressure on the skin.
Taste: Taste refers to the sensory experience of detecting and distinguishing flavors through the chemical stimulation of taste receptors on the tongue.
Smell: Smell refers to the sensory experience and perception of odors and scents through the detection of airborne chemical substances by the olfactory system.
Kinesthetic sense: The kinesthetic sense is a person's awareness and perception of the position and movement of their own body parts in relation to each other and the external environment.
Vestibular sense: The vestibular sense is responsible for our body's sense of balance and spatial orientation, detecting movement, gravitational forces, and head position.
Proprioception: Proprioception refers to the perception and awareness of the position and movements of our body parts in space.
Depth perception: Depth perception is the ability to perceive the relative distance and three-dimensional characteristics of objects in the environment.
Color perception: Color perception refers to the psychological and physiological processes involved in the interpretation of different wavelengths of light as distinct colors.
Attention: Attention refers to the cognitive process of selectively focusing on specific information while inhibiting other distractions.
Memory: Memory refers to the encoding, storing, and retrieval of information in the mind.
Processing speed: Processing speed refers to the rate at which an individual can perceive and process information from the environment.
Executive function: Executive function refers to a set of mental processes that involve cognitive control and the ability to manage one's thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve goals.
Perceptual organization: Perceptual organization refers to the process by which our brain organizes individual sensations into meaningful and coherent perceptions.
Perceptual constancy: Perceptual constancy is the ability of our senses to perceive objects as relatively stable and unchanged despite variations in their sensory input.
Illusions: Illusions in psychology refer to the perceptual distortions or misinterpretations of sensory information, leading to discrepancies between reality and our subjective experience.
Figure-ground perception: Figure-ground perception refers to the ability of the visual system to separate an object of interest (figure) from its surrounding background (ground).
Object recognition: Object recognition is the cognitive process by which we identify and categorize visual stimuli as familiar objects or entities.
Perceptual biases: Perceptual biases refer to systematic errors in our perception and interpretation of sensory information, often influenced by factors such as expectations, previous experiences, and cultural beliefs.
Perceptual learning: Perceptual learning refers to the process through which individuals improve their ability to interpret and make sense of sensory information over time, leading to increased accuracy and efficiency in perception.
Speech perception: Speech perception refers to the cognitive process by which individuals interpret and understand spoken language sounds.
Face perception: Face perception refers to the cognitive and neural processes involved in recognizing, interpreting, and remembering information from facial features for social interaction and identification of individuals.
Time perception: Time perception refers to the subjective experience and estimation of the passage of time.
Spatiotemporal integration.: Spatiotemporal integration is the brain's ability to combine information from multiple senses and over time to create a unified percept of the world.
"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."