Perception as the Process of Becoming Aware of and Understanding the Environment - Essay Example

PerceptionPerception is a word derived from the Latin ‘Perceptio’; and means ‘the process of becoming aware of and understanding the environment; of acknowledging and organizing our understanding of the information that we obtain from our senses’. For a long time it was believed that while perception was the gateway of human experience; it was a rather passive process that accumulated the data that would be attended to by other more active cognitive processes. Research has shown that the process of perception is not as passive as previously thought; and there has been evidence gathered that points to the possibility of active processes being an important part of the perceptual process.

Perception involves the activation of sensory receptors in the difference sense organs of the human body; and the organization of the information gathered which is then relayed to the brain to be processed. The process of perception has been found to be influenced by pervious knowledge and learning as well as expectation. This is evident when an individual perceives a meaningful stimulus in what may be considered by another as random and meaningless stimuli. The process of perception seems to involve a number of complex organizational processes; but it seems very simple to an individual since perception mostly occurs at the non – conscious level of cognitive processing.

Both top – down and bottom – up processes in involved in perception.Perceptual organization tends to follow a number of rules. Some typical rules that we use without even realizing are the rules of Grouping, Segmentation, Segregation, Consistencies, Globality, and others. The most famous of these are the Gestalt laws of grouping like the law of closure. The process of grouping enables an individual to perceive objects are belonging to a larger unit or group. This makes it easier or an individual to pay attention directly to the larger unit to which the individual pieces supposedly belong.

The process of segregation helps us to interpret an object in contrast to another object; thus providing information about the distinctions between objects. The process of segmentation provides us with information about the possibility of significant distinctions between parts of a whole object; and helps us focus on individual components. The law of consistency helps in the recognition of the same or similar objects in different settings or against different backgrounds; while the law of simplicity helps us attribute the most parsimonious meaning to a given stimulus.

The law of globality helps in the generalization of information; without which it would be difficult for humans to choose the most salient data to focus attention on.Thus, the process of perception is an extremely important process in a human attempt at making sense of the novel and old stimuli that constantly bombards our senses.ReferencesGoldstein, E. B. (2009). Sensation and perception. Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780495601494. Pomerantz, J.R. (2003). Perception: Overview. In Nadel, L. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol.

3, London: Nature Publishing Group, pp. 527–537