Perception

In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Methods of studying perception range from essentially biological or physiological approaches, through psychological approaches to the often abstract 'thought-experiments' of mental philosophy.

The senses

Human perception depends on the senses. The classical five senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Along with these there are at least four other senses: proprioception (body awareness), equilibrioception (balance), thermoception (heat) and nociception (pain). Beyond these, some believe in the existence of other senses such as precognition (or foretelling) or telepathy (direct communication between human minds/brains without transmittance through any other medium). While these are controversial, it is known that animals of other species possess senses that are not found in humans: for example, some fish can detect electric fields, while pigeons have been shown to detect magnetic fields and to use them in homing.

History of the study of perception

The subjective nature of perception, and hence of cognition, has attracted the attention of philosophers since antiquity, for example in the qualia which have been known since the Sufi thinkers, or in the extreme idealism of George Berkeley.

Perception is one of the oldest fields within scientific psychology, and there are correspondingly many theories about its underlying processes. The oldest quantitative law in psychology is the Weber-Fechner Law, which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of physical stimuli and their perceptual effects. It was the study of perception that gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approaches.

Perception and reality

Many cognitive psychologists hold that, as we move about in the world, we create a model of how the world works. That is, we sense the objective world, but our sensations map to percepts, and these percepts are provisional, in the same sense that scientific hypotheses are provisional (cf. in the scientific method). As we acquire new information, our percepts shift. Abraham Pais' biography refers to the 'esemplastic' nature of imagination. In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally not perceive it.

This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage, and also in biological mimicry, for example by Peacock butterflies, whose wings bear eye markings that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator.

Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This (with reference to perception) is the claim that sensations are, by themselves, unable to provide a unique description of the world. Sensations require 'enriching', which is the role of the mental model. A different type of theory is the perceptual ecology approach of James J. Gibson. Gibson rejected the assumption of a poverty of stimulus by rejecting the notion that perception is based in sensations. Instead, he investigated what information is actually presented to the perceptual systems. He (and the psychologists who work within this paradigm) detailed how the world could be specified to a mobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of information about the world into energy arrays. Specification is a 1:1 mapping of some aspect of the world into a perceptual array; given such a mapping, no enrichment is required and perception is direct.