The concept of perception and how it affects behavior use examples - Essay Example

This principle goes with each one of the senses. Complex stimuli have the same fraction of a second recognition. Another important analogy from the study would be a symphony orchestra. When they come on stage, it is a cacophonous moment where there are 50 musicians playing random sounds. It is only when they all start playing together does it respond to the auditory sense. "This chaos-complex behavior makes perception possible" (Freeman 79) There are two types of concepts of behavior which follow from perception: the cognitive approach and the evolutionary approach.

In the evolutionary approach, we have a need to understand what is going on in the environment. Our adaptive perception is a result of the behavior responding to the environment. It is when we comprehend and understand that we behave accordingly. The cognitive approach is the "way to look at this is by taking an evolutionary perspective. In the course of our development as a species, perceptual abilities and functions developed because we started to behave, not because we started to understand.

" (Dijksterhuis 866 ) If we go to a soccer match and the crowd starts to throw bottle onto the field, there is a high chance that our evolutionary perception will lead to doing the same thing. When we take the environmental stimulus; filter it in the proper sense organ; process the information, the physiological arousal depending on the part of the brain will manifest the behavior. One explanation is that, upon seeing, soccer hooligans, one may..without being aware of it…start to act like them.

(Dijksterhui 865) Eichmann at the Nuremburg trials said what he did was not wrong, he was only doing as everyone else. (Nuremburg 1954) The cognitive approach would be in such calm surrounding where our physiology arousal in not the same. Our gustatory senses would not have the same physiology arousal if it were a question of life or death or if it were a question of just being hungry. Our perception of food and our behavior of food would not be the same. The 5 responses directly relate to the cognitive evolutionary approach to behavior, referred to as the five f's: freeze, flee, fight, food, or fornication depend on the type of senses and thus will manifest in different types of behavior (Cibelli 2011) The chaos-complex behavior also applies as it is a quick response of a fraction of a second which determines the behavior.

If I see a gang who is ready to attack me in down town Los Angeles, and I am a black belt, I will first use my visual senses to observe each person's movement. Then I will use my auditory senses to hear if there are any other people in the area. It is a question of the chao-complex behavior as everything will happen in a quick second before deciding If I am staying to fight, flee, or to freeze because I am too scared to do anything.. The cognitive approach assumes that there are learnt (social) perceptions as there is a weakness in the sensorial stimulus.

Therefore this approach is information based. Social perception is learned but can stem from a sensorial stimulus. A woman who has been raped, has the stimulus which has caused the behavior of fear. She might transfer this fear into the social perception that all men of the race of that