Impact of Perception

One’s perception matters because it affects how you are going to respond to “what happened,” and what influence you would make on the surroundings.

Perception is the process through which humans translate sensory stimulation into organized experience. This experience, or percept, is a joint product of the stimulation and the translation process. Theoretical assertions about perceiving are often made as though they apply indiscriminately to all organisms, or at least to all people. 

However, clear differences in perceptual functioning exist among individuals, among classes of individuals, and within the same individual from one occasion to another.

Types of Perception

Direct Perception (Naive Realism): Direct realism holds that physical objects are perceived directly, meaning what one immediately perceives is the physical object itself (or a part of it).

Indirect Perception: (Representative Realism) Representative realism suggests that observers are directly aware of sense-data and only indirectly aware of the physical objects that cause those data in the mind.

Social Perception: Social perception involves how people perceive others based on factors such as personality, social roles, emotions, and interpersonal attitudes.

Self-Perception: Perception also extends to oneself, with information about one’s position in space coming from vision, vestibular receptors, and somatic receptors in the skin and deep tissues.

Factors Influencing Perception

-Age: Perceptual functioning changes with age due to maturation and learning. Perceptual constancies are enhanced with increasing age, leveling off around the teenage.

-Culture: There is evidence for more general cultural influences on perception. The type of physical environment people construct for themselves can influence their style of perceiving.

-Learning: Perceiving is modified by learning, supplementing unlearned factors that mediate perceiving. Exposure to recurrent regularities among stimuli prompts one to assume specific relationships between the environment and sensory experience.

-Assumptions: Psychologists contend that one perceives under the strong influence of their learned assumptions and inferences, which provide a context for evaluating sensory data.

-Motivation: Psychoanalytic theory suggests motivational influences on functions such as memory, thinking, and perceiving. Unconscious motives and conflicts, along with unconscious defenses, can affect perception.

When we are “mindful,” we not only see but also perceive. One’s perception matters because it affects how you are going to respond to “what happened,” and what influence you would make on the surroundings.

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