Most people believe they directly and completely perceive the world that surrounds them - Essay Example

31 March Most people believe that they directly and completely perceive the world that surrounds them, discuss:People perceive the world around them using their five basic senses of touch, feel, smell, hear, and taste. Using these senses, they think that they completely perceive the world as it is. However, this is not true. This can be so said because people vary in the functionality of their body organs that these senses are associated with. People differ in their eye-sights. A color blind individual claims to perceive the world just as good as another individual with a normal eye sight does, though the difference is great.

Several factors that include but are not limited to age and gene limit the human senses. As people age, their eye-sight weakens. Likewise, some people are genetically blind. We also perceive things that do not exist in the real world because of the wildness of our imagination. It is the very sense that causes us to come up with innovative things and creative ideas. Often, we come across illusion images concentrating upon which for some time, we acquire the image in our eyes that we retain for some time, though there are none other than biological reasons behind this.

The images are reflected against plain white background for a matter of seconds. As we see around after that, the memory of the image fades away. Contexts in which stimuli are experienced greatly affect human perception and remembrance of those stimuli. This was confirmed in a research conducted by Palmer. In his study, Palmer first made the research participants see a kitchen scene, and the participants were immediately then shown a loaf of bread, a drum and a mailbox (Sternberg, Mio, and Mio 112).

Later when the participants were asked to memorize the things they were shown, all of them remembered the loaf of bread much better than the other two things because the loaf of bread was consistent with the context that the participants were originally shown. Taking the results of this research into consideration, it can be safely said that human perceptions of things are determined by the contexts in which they experience the stimuli. The doctrine of constructivism makes a lot of emphasis upon the meaning.

Constructivism, is in itself a theory that revolves around learning. The main idea behind the doctrine of constructivism is that an individual constructs knowledge on the basis of his/her mental activity. The doctrine of constructivism considers learners as the organisms that actively seek knowledge and meaning. Initially, meaning is constructed in such a way that its relationship is very weak with reality, like the mindset of children, who are in constant phase of discovering the world and perceiving it.

However, with the passage of time, as an individual gains more and more experience, the concepts become more and more complex, well organized and well understood. Humans in the doctrine of constructivism are thought of as perceivers of things and their interpreters. As different people vary in their senses, therefore, they conceive of the world around them differently. Works Cited:Sternberg, Robert J., Mio, Jeff, and Mio, Scott. Cognitive psychology. USA: Wadsworth, 2009. Print.