Perception and its connection to sensation

Perception is the brain's processing of information coming from the senses, so that the complex central nervous system identifies, organizes and interprets information to understand the world around us. This processing takes place outside of human consciousness, and this sensory process is individual, so many people face the same situation but perceive it in a way that differs from the other, and helps to see the world as a stable place despite the change in the sensory information we receive and is sometimes incomplete.

Perception is closely related to sensation, and they can never be separated, because they are part of a single, continuous process. As for human processes, the process stimulates and translates the senses into organized experiences, and since there are many stimuli in the surrounding environment and attract people's attention through their senses, they are able to give an accurate description of the sights, smells and sounds that settle in their conscious experience.

Steps of the Perception Process There are some steps through which the perception process occurs:

Stimulus

The environment of the world around us is full of stimuli that can attract our attention through different senses, and the environmental stimulus is everything in the environment surrounding us, so that we have the ability to perceive it, and this includes anything that can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard.

Interpretation

After perceiving any of the environmental stimuli around us, a visual message is transmitted to the brain for interpretation.

Processing

The messages interpreted by the brain are subject to neural processing, so that the path followed by a particular signal depends on the type of signal (i.e. an auditory signal or a visual signal), and then through a series of interconnected neurons located throughout the body, electrical signals spread from the receptor cells to the brain, thus the person perceives the stimuli in the environment and is aware of their presence.

Discrimination

Perception is not just about becoming aware of the stimuli, it is also necessary for our mind to classify and interpret what we sense, so that the ability to interpret and give meaning to the object is the next step, known as recognition.

Action

Action is the last stage of the perception process, as it is a response to environmental stimuli, and may include a variety of actions such as motor activity.

Types of perception

There are types of perception through which it affects us:

Spatial perception

Spatial perception means a person's ability to perceive and distinguish distances in the real world, such as perceiving the distance between one person and another and the distance between different objects, and also includes perceiving moving objects such as vehicles on the road.

Kinesthetic Perception

It is natural for objects to be in constant motion, as they appear in different places and times. Through this ability, an individual can understand the world around him and can perceive dangers and threats. It is the secret of survival. The phenomenon of apparent motion also depicts fixed objects as if they are moving, making it seem like an illusion to see a fixed moving object, such as seeing trees and houses moving in the opposite direction when we are in a car, although they are actually fixed.

Formal Perception

Formal perception means the ability of people to recognize objects in a specific way within a specific environment, as there are some different laws that determine how to perceive different patterns in space according to Gestalt psychologists:

Law of Convergence

It is a law that stipulates seeing objects or objects as a whole or as a group without seeing the objects or small components that make them up.

Law of Similarity

It is a law that stipulates the collection of similar elements together in a perceptual manner, and color plays an important role in this law. If we look closely at something, the small, close parts are the same color.

Law of Closure:

When we capture incomplete objects, we consciously close them off so that we perceive them as a complete image that is not actually there, such as aligning three incomplete circles in the shape of a pyramid, and sensing the triangle formed using one's own perception, even though the triangle is not actually there.

Law of Personal Shape

This law embodies the idea that when we perceive a visual field, some shapes play a prominent role, while other objects recede into the background, such as taking a picture near a lake with hills and mountains, so that the person will be the center of the picture, while the water, mountains, sky, and other landscapes will be receding into the background of the picture.

Visual Perception Theory

There are many theories about the perception process, the most important of which is visual perception, where scientists distinguish between two types of theories that revolve around the problem of explaining the process by which the physical energy received from the sensory organs is formed:

Bottom-up Processing Theory

James Gibson is a psychologist and the owner of the theory of "direct realism", which is a constructive process based on bottom-up processing, which states that we perceive things as they are in reality exactly and that our senses are able to provide us with direct and accurate information from the outside world. He considers this theory ecological, as the visual information we take from the environment around us is very rich and we do not need cognitive processing and internal representations to understand that information.

Top-down Processing Theory

Gregory is the originator of the theory of "indirect realism", which is a constructive process based on top-down processing, which states that processing is based on prior knowledge and we build a perception of reality based on the surrounding environment and stored information, because interpreting ambiguous stimuli in our environment requires this information either from previous experiences or stored knowledge to make inferences about what we perceive.