Cognitive Psychology take-home final exam - Essay Example

Perception not only helps a person in gathering the information regarding the objects, patterns, people and events around him, but also helps in making sense of the gathered information by attaching meaning to it (Galotti, 2008, p.56). In the process of perception, it is mind who gives meaning to sensed objects. Hence, as mind of a human being functions on the basis of past information, there are also chances of occurrence of errors in perception. It is important to note that people are highly influenced by the past learning and experiences they have.

The past experiences have a great influence on the interpretation of the information that people gather through sensory stimulus (Galotti, 2008, p.57). Visual and spatial errors take place as people, due to the influence of past experience, sometimes perceive what does not exist in the environment and other times, they are not able to recognize the object which is right in front of them (Sternberg, 2009, p.76). In the process of perception, mind plays an important role as it is the mind that gives the meaning to the spatial and the visual objects that are sensed by human beings.

According to Peterson (1999), the perceptual illusions that lead to visual and spatial errors occur because the mind has a tendency to manipulate the information provided by the sensory objects and provide different meanings to “objects, properties, and spatial relationships of our environments” (Sternberg, 2009, p.77). According to Tarr and Bulthoff (1998), the viewpoint developed from the previous experiences affect the process of perception of the objects (Sternberg, 2009, p.77). Hence, as the mind has a tendency to manipulate the information provided through sensory objects, human being makes error in visual and spatial perceptions.

Answer 2 :The cognitive aspects of language acquisition are “receptive comprehension and decoding of language input and expressive