"Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment."
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.
Sensory Processes: The study of the physiological and neural mechanisms of our senses, including vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.
Attention: The ability to selectively focus on certain stimuli amidst the multitude of sensory information available to us.
Memory: The role of perception and attention in learning and retaining information.
Visual Perception: The principles of how the brain processes visual information, including depth perception, color perception, and the perception of motion.
Auditory Perception: The principles of how the brain processes auditory information, including pitch, loudness, and recognition of speech and music.
Haptic Perception: The study of the sense of touch and how we perceive texture, pressure, and temperature.
Gustatory Perception: The study of the sense of taste and how we perceive different flavors and tastes.
Olfactory Perception: The study of the sense of smell and how we distinguish different odors.
Multisensory Integration: The process of combining information from more than one sense to create a unified perception of the world.
Perceptual Illusions: The study of optical illusions and other phenomena that demonstrate how the brain can be fooled by sensory information.
Perceptual Development: The process of how perception develops in infants and children, including how they learn to interpret sensory information.
Perceptual Disorders: The study of neurological disorders that affect perception, including blindsight, agnosia, and synesthesia.
Neural Processing: The study of the neural processes that underpin sensory and perceptual processing, including the role of different brain regions in sensory processing.
Culture and Perception: The ways in which culture and individual experience shape perception and influence how we interpret and react to sensory information.
Visual Perception: Perception of light that travels through the eyes and interpreted by the brain to make sense of images or sights.
Auditory Perception: Perception of sound waves or vibrations that travel through the ears and interpreted by the brain to make sense of sounds or speech.
Tactile Perception: Perception of touch, pressure, texture, temperature, or pain, information received from the skin, muscles and joints.
Gustatory Perception: Perception of taste, related to the tongue's ability to detect and distinguish different flavors.
Olfactory Perception: Perception of smell, related to the nose's ability to detect and analyze different odors.
Proprioceptive Perception: Perception of the body's position and movement, related to the sensory information received from the muscles and joints.
Vestibular Perception: Perception of balance and spatial orientation, related to the sensory input from the inner ear.
Interoceptive Perception: Perception of internal bodily sensations such as hunger, thirst, pain, and emotional states.
Kinesthetic Perception: Perception of body movements and postures based on the feedback from the motor system.
Time Perception: Perception of time intervals, duration and temporal order of events.
Spatial Perception: Perception of spatial relationships, distances, and directions between objects or stimuli.
Social Perception: Perception of other people's mental states, emotions, intentions, and personality traits.
"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."