object perception essay

A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

Model essay plans for theories of perception

AQA Philosophy model essays

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This page contains essay plans for Direct realism, Indirect realism and Idealism.

Direct realism

• Direct realism – the view that the objects of perception are mind-independent objects and their properties.
• This theory is realist as it claims there is a mind-independent reality.
• We perceive reality immediately. We do not perceive a mental representation of reality like sense data. We simply perceive objective reality without any mediation.
• This gives direct realism the strength of seeming to avoid scepticism. If direct realism is true then all our perceptions are veridical.

The perceptual variation issue

• Russell’s table: imagine a shiny table with a beam of light falling on it from a window.
• If you stand in different places in relation to the table, the light can appear to fall on different parts of the table.
• This makes different areas of the table appear lighter brown or darker brown.
• So, this shows that the colour of the table cannot be a mind-independent property of it. It depends on the mind perceiving it.
• Russell also points to the texture of the table feeling smooth, but under a microscope appearing bumpy, or the shape of the table being square or rectangular depending on where you stand.
• Locke’s illustration – if a person puts one hot hand and one cold hand into some lukewarm water, it will feel hot to one hand but cold to the other. 
• So, direct realism is false.
• An intrinsic property is a property a thing has in itself. 
• A relational property is a property a thing has due to its relation to something else.
• Perceptual relational properties exist due to the relation of a thing to an observer. 
• So the direct realist could say that a certain part of the table has the relational property of ‘looking light brown’ to some observer conditions, while also having the relational property of ‘looking dark brown’ to other observer conditions. 
• Similarly, Locke’s water has an intrinsic property of a certain temperature, but it can also have the relational property of ‘feeling hotter than’ and ‘feeling colder than’ depending on the temperature of the organ used to perceive it.
• Locke’s illustration only shows that it’s possible for a single observer to directly perceive two different relational properties at once.
• Direct realists claimed that the objects of perception are mind-independent objects and their properties. 
• They can thus respond that this includes relational properties. 
• So, perceptual variation does not undermine direct realism.
• Sometimes we directly observe an object’s relational properties, which can make it appear different to its intrinsic property, however we still directly observe its properties.

Evaluation:

• Some could attack the relational properties as ‘mind-dependent’. However, they are not. A square table would really have the relational property of ‘looking rectangular’ to a certain perceiver from a certain physical angle, even if there was no perceiver.
• Perceptual variation could be explained by either relational properties or sense data. 
• Indirect realism faces the issue of scepticism since it claims we never directly perceive reality. 
• Ockham’s razor also shows that direct realism is simpler due to not proposing that sense-data exists.
• This puts direct realism in a stronger position than indirect realism. 
• So, we seem justified in accepting its relational property explanation of perceptual variation over the indirect realist sense data explanation.
• However, the relational properties response arguably leads to scepticism.
• If one person sees the table as light brown and another as dark brown, this creates a sceptical issue for direct realism. How could we ever know what colour the table actually is? How can we tell which perception is directly perceiving the intrinsic property?
• We could never tell what the actual intrinsic property of an object is, since every time we perceive it for all we know we could be perceiving its relational properties instead.
• So, direct realism is unconvincing as it is not in a stronger position than indirect realism regarding scepticism. 

The hallucination issue

• P1. According to direct realism, if I perceive object p, then object p exists mind-independently.
• P2. During a hallucination I observe an object p , but there is no object p.
• C1. Therefore, the object of perception p must be mind-dependent sense data.
• P3. Hallucinations can be subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perception.
• C2. Therefore, in all cases, the objects of perception are mind-dependent sense data. So direct realism is false.
• The disjunctive theory of perception
• Firstly, P1 & P2 does not justify C1. Hallucinations might not be sense data since they might not be perceptions at all – they could be uncontrollable projections of the imagination, which explains their being mind-dependent. 
• Secondly, P3 does not justify C2. It could be true that hallucinations are mind-dependent, and yet other perceptions are not mind-dependent.
• Just because hallucinations look like ordinary perceptions, even if they were mind-dependent, that wouldn’t prove that ordinary perceptions are mind-dependent.
• Just because we are epistemically unable to tell them apart, doesn’t mean they are ontologically the same type of thing.
• So, direct realists could still be correct about perceptions being of mind-independent objects.
• There is still a sceptical issue for direct realism arising from this, however.
• If hallucinations appear like ordinary perceptions, then even if technically that doesn’t mean they are like ordinary perceptions, nonetheless we still can’t tell them apart.
• This means that all of our perceptions could be a hallucination for all we know. So, we can’t gain knowledge from perception.
• This version of the hallucination argument is in a stronger position because it cannot be avoided by the disjunctive theory of perception.
• So, direct realism leads to scepticism – making it less convincing as an epistemological theory of perception.

The time lag argument

• It takes time for light to bounce off an object and then enter our eyes.
• This means that our perceptions of objects are not as they exist exactly now, but at some time in the past.
• This seems to question whether we are seeing objects directly.
• This becomes clearer with the example of distant stars. Their light can take millions of years to reach us. Some of the stars we see have actually exploded or died, but we still see them.
• It can’t make sense to say we are directly perceiving something if it doesn’t actually exist.
• The objects of perception cannot be a mind-independent object, if that object does not exist.
• However, the direct realist can respond that this issue confuses what we see with how we see.
• Light is a physical medium by which we perceive objects. 
• We don’t actually perceive the light itself, except in special cases – like seeing light reflecting off paper or a lake.
• Normally, when perceiving an object, we simply perceive the object, not the light.
• Light therefore does not mediate our perception – it doesn’t present us with a representation that we perceive (since we don’t perceive the light). It simply presents us with the object itself.
• Light is how we perceive objects, but not what we perceive.
• Light delays our perception because it takes time, but it does not mediate our perception.
• Directness does not require instantaneity.
• Time lag can only show that our perception is delayed, not that it isn’t direct.
• Direct realists can thus be successfully defended because the necessary condition of directness is immediacy, not instantaneity.
• Seeing something directly doesn’t require seeing it as it is now, it simply requires that our perception of it is not mediated, that we aren’t perceiving it ‘through’ something else (like sense data) that represents it. 
• We are just directly perceiving the object, but as it was, not as it currently is.
• Direct realism only claims that the objects of perception are mind-independent objects and their properties.
• Direct realism is not committed to the objects we perceive actually existing at the moment of perception. It claims only that our perception of them is direct – unmediated.

Conclusion: 

• Direct realism can be defended against the time-lag argument. The perceptual variation and hallucination issues cannot prove direct realism false because of the appeal to relational properties. However that defence did lead to scepticism. So, direct realism is unconvincing as an epistemological theory of perception.

Indirect realism

• Indirect realism is the view that the objects of perception are mind-dependent objects which are caused by and represent mind-independent objects.
• The strength of indirect realism is that it fits with the common-sense understanding of our perception that our experience teaches us. We are all familiar with the way our perception can be altered. Illusions, hallucination and perceptual variation suggests that our experience is a mental representation of reality, not reality itself.

The issue that indirect realism leads to scepticism about the existence of mind-independent objects

• Indirect realism claims that we only perceive sense data and that sense data is caused by a mind-independent reality.
• However, if we only have direct awareness of sense data, how do we know that sense data is actually caused by mind-independent objects? How do we know there is an external world at all? 
• On this view, for all we know, so-called ‘sense data’ is actually caused by our imagination and there is no external world at all.
• If indirect realism is true, sense data is a ‘veil of perception’ behind which we cannot perceive or know.
• So, indirect realism’s claim that sense data is caused by mind-independent objects is epistemically undermined by its claim that sense data is all we perceive.
• Locke’s argument from the coherence of the various senses.
• When we perceive an apple, we see it, feel it and can taste it. The senses cohere and thus provide evidence for the validity of each other. 
• We have multiple different senses – it seems the fact that they all cohere and sense the same things at the same time is good evidence for thinking there really is a mind-independent object. The chance that each sense would mistakenly report the same object at the same time seems very low.
• Locke’s argument from the involuntary nature of experience.
• If there was no mind-independent world, our perceptions would come from our imagination.
• However, we have control over our imagination, but not our perception.
• So, our perceptions must originate from an external world.
• So, we have a basis for rejecting scepticism and claiming that sense data is caused by mind-independent objects.
• Locke’s argument is inductive because he’s arguing there is evidence about the nature of our experience that can be used to infer the nature of its origin.
• However, Locke’s argument is weak because even if it succeeds in showing that our perceptions originate from outside our minds, that wouldn’t show it was caused by a mind-independent reality. It could be caused by another mind or higher being, like the mind of God, as Berkeley suggests.
• Perceptions could simply be caused by an unconscious part of our imagination (e.g. hallucinations) we have no awareness of control over, which produces perceptions for all our senses in a way which coheres with each other.
• So, Locke can’t escape scepticism about the existence of mind-independent reality nor solipsism.

Rusell’s best hypothesis response

• Russell’s response to scepticism is in a stronger position than Locke’s inductive approach. 
• The nature of our experience, including its involuntary and coherent nature, are not better evidence for its origin being a real world compared to an evil demon or our own subconscious. 
• We cannot prove there is a mind-independent reality, but nor can we prove there isn’t.  
• Russell claims such cases justify resorting to an abductive approach of determining which explanation provides the best hypothesis. This means which explanation has the most explanatory power , i.e., provides the most explanation of why our perceptions are the way they are.
• There are two possibilities. Either there is a mind-independent reality causing our perceptions, or there isn’t. Russell gives the example of seeing his cat in his room, but the next time he looks it’s somewhere else.
• If there is no mind-independent reality causing those perceptions then we have no explanation of why those perceptions occurred. We have no explanation of the regularity and order in which our perceptions tend to appear.
• Yet if there is a mind-independent reality causing our perceptions, then we have an explanation of why they are the way they are. The cat’s perceived location changed because it has a mind-independent existence and it moved.
• So, we are justified in believing that our perceptions are caused by a mind-independent external world because it is the best hypothesis.
• Russell’s argument is abductive. Even if it succeeds, it’s not defeating scepticism to a convincing degree. (link to idealism as in a stronger position due to defeating scepticism more convincingly?)
• Furthermore, it doesn’t even succeed. There could be some reason why our unconscious imagination is producing perceptions that are orderly and regular. Perhaps we are living in a hallucinated dream-world that our mind has created to protect us from reality. Our minds could be completely disconnected from reality, if there even is one.
• Or, it could be that another powerful mind which wants to produce deceptively seemingly real perceptions in us is producing our orderly and regular perceptions. If there’s an evil demon and us, there need not be a physical ‘realist’ reality. Or Berkley’s suggestion that God is the origin of our perceptions would also be an equally powerful explanation.
• This possibility would explain the orderliness and regularity of our perceptions just as well as the possibility that a mind-independent reality causes them.
• So, a mind-independent reality causing our perceptions doesn’t have more explanatory power than other possible explanations, so we can’t claim it is the ‘best ‘hypothesis.

Berkeley’s criticism that mind-dependent objects cannot be like (resemble) mind-independent objects.

• IDR claims that sense data represents mind-independent objects.
• Berkeley responds that for something to represent something else, they must be alike.
• Berkeley’s ‘likeness principle’ claims that to justifiably know that two things are alike, requires that we can compare them – to verify that they are in fact alike.
• However, since IDR leads to a veil of perception, we never directly experience mind-independent objects.
• In that case, we can never compare sense data to what it supposedly represents.
• So, we can never justifiably claim that sense data represents mind-independent objects.
• If we perceive, e.g. a table, how do we know that this represents a mind-independent object, if we never directly perceive the mind-independent object?
• So, indirect realism is self-undermining since its claim that we only experience mind-dependent sense data undermines its further claim that this sense data represents mind-independent objects.
• A limitation of Berkeley’s critique is that he assumes representation requires likeness or resemblance. 
• Representation seems to be possible without likeness/resemblance.
• For example, the symbols we use in language are arbitrary, meaning they have no resemblance or likeness to the objects they represent.
• The word ‘chair’ is not like a chair but nonetheless can represent it. 
• So, mind-dependent objects could still represent mind-independent objects even if they are not like them.
• However, we can defend Berkeley’s conclusion by improving his argument into a stronger form which does not rely on his likeness principle.
• The claim of representation still requires justification.
• How does one know that a mind-dependent object represents a mind-independent object, if a mind-independent object has never been perceived.
• We only know that the word ‘chair’ represents a chair, because we have experienced a chair.
• If we have no experienced mind-independent objects, then we can’t know that our perceptions represent them in any way.
• Even if we accept that ‘likeness’ isn’t’ required for representation, nonetheless for all we know, our perceptions might not even represent the mind-independent world. It could be totally non-representative of our perceptions in any respect.
• So, we just cannot know whether our perceptions represent mind-independent objects. 
• So, indirect realism’s claim that the objects of perception are mind-dependent objects does undermine its claim that they represent mind-independent objects and the theory thus leads to scepticism.

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What Is Perception?

Recognizing Environmental Stimuli Through the Five Senses

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Perception refers to our sensory experience of the world. It is the process of using our senses to become aware of objects, relationships. It is through this experience that we gain information about the environment around us.

Perception relies on the cognitive functions we use to process information, such as utilizing memory to recognize the face of a friend or detect a familiar scent. Through the perception process, we are able to both identify and respond to environmental stimuli.

Perception includes the five senses; touch, sight, sound, smell , and taste . It also includes what is known as proprioception, which is a set of senses that enable us to detect changes in body position and movement.

Many stimuli surround us at any given moment. Perception acts as a filter that allows us to exist within and interpret the world without becoming overwhelmed by this abundance of stimuli.

Types of Perception

The types of perception are often separated by the different senses. This includes visual perception, scent perception, touch perception, sound perception, and taste perception. We perceive our environment using each of these, often simultaneously.

There are also different types of perception in psychology, including:

• Person perception refers to the ability to identify and use social cues about people and relationships.
• Social perception is how we perceive certain societies and can be affected by things such as stereotypes and generalizations.

Another type of perception is selective perception. This involves paying attention to some parts of our environment while ignoring others.

The different types of perception allow us to experience our environment and interact with it in ways that are both appropriate and meaningful.

How Perception Works

Through perception, we become more aware of (and can respond to) our environment. We use perception in communication to identify how our loved ones may feel. We use perception in behavior to decide what we think about individuals and groups.

We are perceiving things continuously, even though we don't typically spend a great deal of time thinking about them. For example, the light that falls on our eye's retinas transforms into a visual image unconsciously and automatically. Subtle changes in pressure against our skin, allowing us to feel objects, also occur without a single thought.

Perception Process

To better understand how we become aware of and respond to stimuli in the world around us, it can be helpful to look at the perception process. This varies somewhat for every sense.

In regard to our sense of sight, the perception process looks like this:

• Environmental stimulus: The world is full of stimuli that can attract attention. Environmental stimulus is everything in the environment that has the potential to be perceived.
• Attended stimulus: The attended stimulus is the specific object in the environment on which our attention is focused.
• Image on the retina: This part of the perception process involves light passing through the cornea and pupil, onto the lens of the eye. The cornea helps focus the light as it enters and the iris controls the size of the pupils to determine how much light to let in. The cornea and lens act together to project an inverted image onto the retina.
• Transduction: The image on the retina is then transformed into electrical signals through a process known as transduction. This allows the visual messages to be transmitted to the brain to be interpreted.
• Neural processing: After transduction, the electrical signals undergo neural processing. The path followed by a particular signal depends on what type of signal it is (i.e. an auditory signal or a visual signal).
• Perception: In this step of the perception process, you perceive the stimulus object in the environment. It is at this point that you become consciously aware of the stimulus.
• Recognition: Perception doesn't just involve becoming consciously aware of the stimuli. It is also necessary for the brain to categorize and interpret what you are sensing. The ability to interpret and give meaning to the object is the next step, known as recognition.
• Action: The action phase of the perception process involves some type of motor activity that occurs in response to the perceived stimulus. This might involve a major action, like running toward a person in distress. It can also involve doing something as subtle as blinking your eyes in response to a puff of dust blowing through the air.

Think of all the things you perceive on a daily basis. At any given moment, you might see familiar objects, feel a person's touch against your skin, smell the aroma of a home-cooked meal, or hear the sound of music playing in your neighbor's apartment. All of these help make up your conscious experience and allow you to interact with the people and objects around you.

Recap of the Perception Process

• Environmental stimulus
• Attended stimulus
• Image on the retina
• Transduction
• Neural processing
• Recognition

Factors Influencing Perception

What makes perception somewhat complex is that we don't all perceive things the same way. One person may perceive a dog jumping on them as a threat, while another person may perceive this action as the pup just being excited to see them.

Our perceptions of people and things are shaped by our prior experiences, our interests, and how carefully we process information. This can cause one person to perceive the exact same person or situation differently than someone else.

Perception can also be affected by our personality. For instance, research has found that four of the Big 5 personality traits —openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism—can impact our perception of organizational justice.

Conversely, our perceptions can also affect our personality. If you perceive that your boss is treating you unfairly, for example, you may show traits related to anger or frustration. If you perceive your spouse to be loving and caring, you may show similar traits in return.

Are Perception and Attitude the Same?

While they are similar, perception and attitude are two different things. Perception is how we interpret the world around us, while our attitude (our emotions, beliefs, and behaviors) can impact these perceptions.

Tips to Improve Perception

If you want to improve your perception skills, there are some things that you can do. Actions you can take that may help you perceive more in the world around you—or at least focus on the things that are important—include:

• Pay attention. Actively notice the world around you, using all your senses. What do you see, hear, taste, smell, or touch? Using your sense of proprioception, notice the movements of your arms and legs, or your changes in body position.
• Make meaning of what you perceive. The recognition stage of the perception process is essential since it allows you to make sense of the world around you. Place objects in meaningful categories, so you can understand and react appropriately.
• Take action. The final step of the perception process involves taking some sort of action in response to your environmental stimulus. This could involve a variety of actions, such as stopping to smell the flower you see on the side of the road, incorporating more of your senses.

Potential Pitfalls of Perception

The perception process does not always go smoothly, and there are a number of things that may interfere with our ability to interpret and respond to our environment. One is having a disorder that impacts perception.

Perceptual disorders are cognitive conditions marked by an impaired ability to perceive objects or concepts. Some disorders that may affect perception include:

• Spatial neglect syndromes, which involve not attending to stimuli on one side of the body
• Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is a disorder that makes it difficult to recognize faces
• Aphantasia , a condition characterized by an inability to visualize things in your mind
• Schizophrenia , which is marked by abnormal perceptions of reality

Some of these conditions may be influenced by genetics, while others result from stroke or brain injury.

Perception can also be negatively affected by certain factors. For instance, one study found that when people viewed images of others, they perceived individuals with nasal deformities as having less satisfactory personality traits. So, factors such as this can potentially affect personality perception.

History of Perception

Interest in perception dates back to the time of ancient Greek philosophers who were interested in how people know the world and gain understanding. As psychology emerged as a science separate from philosophy, researchers became interested in understanding how different aspects of perception worked—particularly, the perception of color.

In addition to understanding basic physiological processes, psychologists were also interested in understanding how the mind interprets and organizes these perceptions.

Gestalt psychologists proposed a holistic approach, suggesting that the sum equals more than the sum of its parts.  Cognitive psychologists have also worked to understand how motivations and expectations can play a role in the process of perception.

As time progresses, researchers continue to investigate perception on the neural level. They also look at how injury, conditions, and substances might affect perception.

American Psychological Association. Perception .

University of Minnesota. 3.4 Perception . Organizational Behavior .

Jhangiani R, Tarry H. 5.4 Individual differences in person perception . Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International H5P Edition .

Aggarwal A, Nobi K, Mittal A, Rastogi S. Does personality affect the individual's perceptions of organizational justice? The mediating role of organizational politics . Benchmark Int J . 2022;29(3):997-1026. doi:10.1108/BIJ-08-2020-0414

Saylor Academy. Human relations: Perception's effect . Human Relations .

ICFAI Business School. Perception and attitude (ethics) . Personal Effectiveness Management .

King DJ, Hodgekins J, Chouinard PA, Chouinard VA, Sperandio I. A review of abnormalities in the perception of visual illusions in schizophrenia .  Psychon Bull Rev . 2017;24(3):734‐751. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1168-5

van Schijndel O, Tasman AJ, Listschel R. The nose influences visual and personality perception . Facial Plast Surg . 2015;31(05):439-445. doi:10.1055/s-0035-1565009

Goldstein E. Sensation and Perception .

Yantis S. Sensation and Perception .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Berkeley on the objects of perception

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• Berkeley’s theory of perception
• act-object theory of perception
• relational theory of perception
• adverbialism
• direct realism
• appearances

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• Perception Arts and Humanities 100%
• Object Arts and Humanities 100%
• Theories of perception Arts and Humanities 40%
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T1 - Berkeley on the objects of perception

AU - Marusic, Jennifer Smalligan

N2 - In the first of the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Hylas distinguishes two parts or aspects of every perception, namely a sensation, which is an act of mind, and an object immediately perceived. Hylas concedes that sensations can exist only in a mind, but maintains that the objects immediately perceived have a real existence outside the mind; they are qualities of material objects. This distinction and Philonous’s response to it are the topic of this essay. It considers the implications of this response for understanding Berkeley’s theory of perception and concludes that it supports attributing to Berkeley an object-first theory of perception, according to which it is the special kind of object involved in perception that is philosophically significant.

AB - In the first of the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Hylas distinguishes two parts or aspects of every perception, namely a sensation, which is an act of mind, and an object immediately perceived. Hylas concedes that sensations can exist only in a mind, but maintains that the objects immediately perceived have a real existence outside the mind; they are qualities of material objects. This distinction and Philonous’s response to it are the topic of this essay. It considers the implications of this response for understanding Berkeley’s theory of perception and concludes that it supports attributing to Berkeley an object-first theory of perception, according to which it is the special kind of object involved in perception that is philosophically significant.

KW - Berkeley’s theory of perception

KW - act-object theory of perception

KW - relational theory of perception

KW - adverbialism

KW - direct realism

KW - sensation

KW - appearances

KW - mental act

U2 - 10.1093/oso/9780198755685.003.0004

DO - 10.1093/oso/9780198755685.003.0004

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

SN - 9780198755685

BT - Berkeley's Three Dialogues

A2 - Storrie, Stefan

PB - Oxford University Press

Perceptual objectivity and the limits of perception

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• Published: 12 April 2018
• Volume 18 , pages 879–892, ( 2019 )

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Common sense takes the physical world to be populated by mind-independent particulars. Why and with what right do we hold this view? Early phenomenologists argue that the common sense view is our natural starting point because we experience objects as mind-independent. While it seems unsurprising that one can perceive an object being red or square, the claim that one can experience an object as mind-independent is controversial. In this paper I will articulate and defend the claim that we can experience mind-independence by mainly drawing on the work of the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker who, in turn, built on Husserl’s work. In the development of this claim the notion of a limit – either a maximum or minimum – of perception will play an important role.

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1 Early phenomenologists on objective experience

We can introduce our topic by comparing and contrasting two cases Footnote 1 :

You look up at the night sky and I have a visual experience as of many stars twinkling.

You bang your head hard and ‘see stars’.

We could say, without yet putting any explanatory weight on it, that in (A) you have an experience as of a multitude of objects that seem to you to be out there to be encountered. In contrast, in (B) there is a multitude of ‘things’, but they don’t seem to you to be ‘out there’ to be encountered. Let’s call an experience of the kind you have in (A) an ‘objective experience’. An objective experience is not just an experience of something that exists independently of any mental activity but that also (purports to) represents its object(s) as mind-independent.

Several early phenomenologists argued that we have such objective experiences. Here are four examples that will help to anchor our discussion. Footnote 2

First , Paul Linke (1876–1955) wrote with reference to an example given by the Munich phenomenologist Hans Cornelius:

Even the immediately perceived Corneliusian grey spot is given to me as something independent from me whether it is real or not. (Linke 1918, 124; my translation.)

If a surface looks to me as if there is a grey spot on it, it seems to me as if there is a spot ‘out there’, whether there is one or not. I experience the spot, in Linke’s terminology, as ‘extraneous to me’ (“ichfremd”) and ‘extraneous to the act of perception (“aktfremd”) (ibid.).

Second , Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) asked his readers to consider perceiving a red ball:

The ball has – if it exists at all – its own being [Eigensein], and it is for the ball completely accidental that it is perceived by someone. It suffers no changes in virtue of the fact that it is perceived and it is given as such an object that continues to exist in space after we have closed our eyes and no longer perceive it. (Ingarden 1930 , 272-3, my translation and emphasis.)

The ball does not only exist without being perceived, says Ingarden, it is given to the perceiver as something that would persist in space if it were not (no longer) perceived. We experience the ball as something that is disposed to go on existing independently of our experience of it.

Third , the Gestaltpsychologist Karl Duncker (1903–40) called non-epistemic visual perception ‘visual participation’: perceiving is a form of participating in the changes and being of an object. This terminology may strike one as idiosyncratic but we can easily reformulate Duncker’s statements without it. He writes:

Visual participation requires, first of all, the object in which we participate. In the very nature of participation as such lies the independence, the being-in-itself of this object with reference to the act of participation. In other words, participation in an object is not creation of the object. Beyond this, it is characteristic of visual participation (in contradistinction to many another type of participation) that the object remains untouched phenomenally. The tree enters my vision and leaves it; but it does not, for that reason, change qua that tree. The world of objects is experienced as “unverändert durchgehend,” as “persisting unchanged” (“object-constancy”) . The phenomenon of being-in-itself and of persisting unchanged is the objective correlate of the phenomenon of (merely-) participating-in. (Duncker 1947 , 506-507, my emphasis.) Footnote 3

A page later, Duncker sums this up by stating that ‘the objective world is experienced as transcending the temporal and spatial limits of vision, as “ persisting ”.’

Duncker introduces here the concept that will be the key to understand objective experience: the concept of the limit of perception. When we have a perceptual experience as of an object, we are aware in our experience of the limits of our contact with the object and can experience the object ‘transcending’ these limits. We can experience the object as persisting beyond the limits of our perception. The phenomenon of persistence is not restricted to vision (ibid). There is an experiential difference between an auditory experience as of a note gradually softening and finally ceasing on the one hand and an auditory experience as of a note that is played with the same volume gradually becoming less distinct on the other hand. In the second case we experience the note as transcending or persisting beyond the limits of our auditory experience.

Having such an objective experience is independent of the perceiver’s beliefs about the object of their experience. To make the belief-independence of objective experience plausible, think of your perceptual experience of the ball. I tell you that you are participating in a psychological experiment and that you will be undergoing an illusion of seeing a ball rolling away from you because you took hallucination inducing drugs. In fact you do see a ball rolling away from you; I misinformed you: there is no experiment at all. In this situation you will have an experience as of the ball as persisting when it rolls too far away from you to see it. Since your belief that you are undergoing an illusion prevents you from applying your beliefs about the ball, the appearance of persistence must indeed be a matter of how things visually seem to you.

Fourth , when speaking of ‘phenomenal autonomy of persistence’ Duncker refers, like Ingarden before him, to Hedwig Conrad -Martius. Conrad-Martius coined the suggestive term, ‘phenomenal claim to autonomy of being’ (‘phänomenaler Anspruch auf Daseinsautonomie’). Footnote 4 In perceptual experience, objects make a claim on us to be perceived as existing independently of our perceptions. One way they do so is that we experience the limits of our experience of some objects; another way is that we encounter objects that were beyond the limits of our experience. When you walk around the corner it seems to you that you encounter objects that were there all along. Again the experience of a limit of your experience and what lies beyond it is needed to make sense of an experience of encountering an object that was there all along. Conrad -Martius discussed this aspect of objective experience in detail and I will come back to her work in section 6 .

I hope the four descriptions resonate with the reader. If these authors are on the right track, we not only perceive mind-independent objects, sometimes we experience a mind-independent object as being mind-independent: in our experience of it we experience the object’s persistence beyond the limits our perceiving. The main task of this paper will be answer the question what the experience as of an object be like for it to be an experience of an object as well as an experience of its own limits.

2 Perceptual constancy as a model

Common sense has it that perceiving an object depends on a number of factors: the perceiver is in the right position with respect to it, she is not too far or too close to the object, the illumination is right etc. Evans ( 1980 , 261ff) envisaged that these conditions are collected in a rudimentary theory of perception. The folk theory of perception will contain conditionals such as

If x moves behind y, x will no longer be perceived.

If x moves some distance from a perceiver, it will no longer be perceived.

If the perceiver is distracted, x will no longer be perceived by her.

If the light is too bright (dim), x won’t be perceived.

If some of these conditions are not satisfied, the object will not be perceived. But it would be perceived again, if they were fulfilled. Our grasp of what it is to be mind-independent consists in our knowledge of factors on which our perceptual experience depends and which put limits on it. If we were perceptually aware of the limits of our perception, we could experience our perception of an object depending and transgressing them. This would amount to an experiential awareness of mind-independence.

A well-known phenomenon makes it plausible that we are indeed perceptually aware of factors on which our perceiving of an object depends: perceptual constancies. Let us consider two examples:

Colour constancy: When the illumination changes a white surface still looks white although it seems brighter than before. The colour looks the same; the illumination, a condition for perception, seems to change.

Size constancy: I walk towards a tower. When I approach the tower its visual manifestation expands: it occupies more and more of my visual field. Yet the tower does not appear to change in size: it looks the same size. In turn, it seems to us that the distance between us and the object is decreasing. Footnote 5

Both (A) and (B) are examples of, to use Hopp’s ( 2011 , 149) helpful formulation, ‘a feature appearing differently under different conditions while not appearing to be different’. In the perceptual processes described in (A) and (B) we experience changes in the factors mentioned in the folk theory of perception. In an extended perceiving – my seeing the tower while I approach it – we experience the change of an intervening factor – here, the distance between us and the tower – as well as the constant size of the object to which we attend in perception. Duncker’s description of the perceptual constancy phenomena is therefore spot on:

These facts prove that there are other cases in which a living being (not only man) spontaneously experiences certain phenomena as characteristics, not of things, but of an intervening factor. (Duncker 1947 , 539)

In general, if a perceptual system enables the perceiver to experience changes in relations between the perceiver and the object of perception (the intervening factors) and thereby to experience that the existence and character of her experience depends on the holding of these relations, the perceiver can experience objects as being independent of his actual perceptions. Footnote 6

3 Experiencing mind-independence

We can now use these ideas to make progress with objective experience; the experience of something as mind-independent . In order to experience something in this way, it does not suffice to have an experience of an object as independent of our actual perception. It must perceptually seem to us as if the object persists while our perceiving of it reaches its limit: we need to have an experience as of an object persisting beyond the limits our perceiving . Are there such experiences?

Yes, answered Duncker:

Just as, under certain circumstances, a darkening is experienced as a diminution of illumination rather than as a darkening of the object color, just so a disappearance or a fading is under certain circumstances experienced as the cessation or as a diminution of participation, not as disappearance or fading of the object. (Duncker 1947 , 540)

You can experience a fading either as a change in an intervening factor – a change in the relation to the object is experienced, while the object does not seem to change – or as a change in the object – a gradual ceasing to be – while the intervening factors seem not to change. If one is able to have experiences of the former kind, one will be able to experience the mind-independence of an object. We experience the object as constant through experienced changes of conditions of perceivability – perceptual constancy – and we experience the object as constant through changes beyond a limit of perceivability: mind-independence. In experiences of the second kind something, an object or process, seems to persist, while our perceiving reaches a limit. Such experiences are the basis for our understanding of mind-independence. We get a sense that the object of perception persists beyond the limits of perception. I will come back to the notion of an objective experience in the next section.

Cassam recently rediscovered this idea. He pictures himself walking towards and then past a tree in a quad:

As I keep walking, the tree eventually recedes until at some point I can no longer see it. To experience the tree as receding from view is not to experience it as diminishing in size. Receding is not the same as ceasing to exist, and the experience of an object gradually disappearing from view is not the experience of it gradually ceasing to exist. My experience represents the tree as persisting as my location changes and I move away. (Cassam 2014 , 162)

Cassam uses this observation to address what he and John Campbell call ‘Berkeley’s Puzzle’: how do we acquire concepts of mind-independent objects in the first place? The answer is straightforward, says Cassam: our experience represents some things as mind-independent and we can abstract the concept from there.

In the next sections, we will not assess whether this is the way to solve Berkeley’s puzzle, but what, in general, the case must be for one to have experiences of one’s perceiving of a persisting object ‘diminishing’. If Duncker is on the right track, we can answer this question in part by drawing on what we know about perceptual constancy. Footnote 7 However, we will see that we need to go beyond the concepts necessary to describe perceptual constancies to understand what it is for an object to appear mind-independent.

4 Perceptual anticipations and perceptual maxima and minima

There is an experiential difference between experiencing the perishing or dissolution of an object and experiencing the worsening of one’s perceiving of an object that continues to exist beyond our perceiving. What must experience as of objects be like to allow for this difference?

In the background of the work of authors in the phenomenological tradition is Husserl’s answer to this question. So let’s have a look at it. Husserl’s work on perception is fueled by discoveries about perceptual constancies. For example, colour constancy was explored by a number of psychologists, such as Hering ( 1905 ), Katz ( 1911 ) and Gelb ( 1929 ). They influenced Husserl and he influenced them. Footnote 8 Husserl is concerned with the experiential side of perceptual constancies:

Different acts can perceive the same and yet sense different things. The same tone we hear once spatially near and once far. (Husserl 1913b , 381; my translation) Footnote 9

One can distinguish in an extended perceiving different phases. But throughout its different phases the identity of the object perceived is manifest, although it appears differently in different phases. The question is what links the different phases of such an extended perceiving perceptions together.

Husserl’s answer, in essence, is that it seems to us that we perceive one and the same object through changes of appearance because our experiences are connected to intentions that have conditions of fulfillment. It is tempting to construe these intentions as expectations, that is, beliefs about perceptions one will have at a later point in time. Husserl is adamant that this temptation needs to resisted:

Intention is not expectation; it is not essential to it that it directed towards a future realization. (Husserl 1913a , b II/2, 40; my translation)

Husserl motivates the distinction between intention and expectation with a suggestive example. Footnote 10 You see a carpet with a particular pattern on it, but part of the carpet is hidden by a piece of furniture. In this case ‘we, as it were, feel that the lines and colour patterns continue ‘in the sense’ of what we have seen’ (1913b II/2, 40; my translation.). But we have no expectations about how the pattern will look if we go on perceive the parts hidden from us; we know that we can’t perceive these parts. The intentions under consideration – I will follow the literature in calling them ‘anticipations – differ from expectations, but they can prompt expectations. If we just look at an object in front of us without intending to move closer or around it, we anticipate how other parts of the object look. These anticipations prompt expectations about how the object will appear to us when we start to move in relation to the object of perception. Footnote 11

In the visual case, anticipations are pictorial clues or suggestions ( bildliche Andeutungen ). Take the carpet pattern example: the look of the pattern suggests how its hidden parts look. Similarly, if I see the front of a cubus, some of its parts are seen well others poorly. My current view of the cubus is a good view of its front as well as a poor view of its side. Footnote 12 Yet, the poor view of its side is still a view of its side. The poor view of the side suggests to me a better view of the side under differ conditions. The look of the object from one perspective gives you a clue how it looks from a different perspective: it looks to me such that I can get a better view of its side if I change my position. Footnote 13 Such clues can be confirmed or fulfilled in further perceptions. When one changes one’s position, it seems to one that one is seeing something better that one has already seen poorly.

Perceptual anticipations are, in general, fulfilled in further perceptions and we experience their fulfillment:

The prior intention was directed on the same object as the current one, but what was only unclearly suggested in the first intention is now itself given, or at least more clearly, more richly, obviously more adequately given and thereof we have an immediate awareness, we experience the fulfillment of the suggestion as a peculiar feature of the new perception or, respectively, as a unity creating moment in the succession of acts . (Husserl 1898 , 144. My translation and emphasis.)

Husserl’s description strikes me as spot on. When you see the sides of the book better, you sometimes feel that things look as they should look. This feeling is, in part, negatively characterised as the absence of surprise. Footnote 14 When one has this feeling, one experiences some acts as belonging to one extended perceiving.

Some of our perceptions are tied together by chains of anticipations and experienced fulfillments to an extended perceiving of one object. In such an extended perceiving we experience sameness of object through manifest changes of perception. If the anticipations concern changes of conditions – how the object will look if we move closer or change our position relative to it – and we experience the fulfillment of the anticipations, we experience perceptual constancy. It seems to us that we perceive the same object from a different side, from a better perspective or from closer up. The interplay of anticipation and experienced fulfillment makes it possible to have an experience of manifest sameness of an object perceived through changes of appearance. It is the person-level counterpart to the requirement that the perceptual faculty ‘locates’ some perceived changes in changes of the conditions of perception. Footnote 15

This interplay of anticipation and experienced fulfillment is absent in what Husserl calls ‘adequate perception’. The following example, in which a tone – an objective particular – and the hearing of the tone are contrasted, helps us to see Husserl’s distinction between adequate and inadequate perception:

An emotional experience has no adumbrations. If I turn my gaze on it, I have something absolute, it has no sides that represent themselves once in this, then that way. […] In contrast, the tone of a violin with its objective identity is only given in adumbrations; it has its changing appearances. These differ depending on whether I approach or move away from the violin, whether I am in the concert hall or listen through closed doors etc. No appearance is privileged as the absolute one. … (Husserl 1913b , 81. My translation.)

Emotional experience serves here as a representative example of experience in general. ‘Adumbration’ is Husserl’s term for the appearances of external objects: such objects are given only in adumbrations; objects of this kind adumbrate. Other objects, experiences, that is, mental acts and activities, don’t adumbrate (see Husserl 1913b , 77). Consciousness of one’s present mental acts suggests no further acts of awareness in which anticipations are fulfilled or ‘disappointed’. For this reason, Husserl calls it ‘absolute’. Consider further emotions. Your awareness of your anger does not suggest further acts of awareness to you in which the anger is perceived better. You may have inductive knowledge that your raging anger will abate soon and change into a less violent emotion. But this expectation is not suggested by your present awareness of anger. It is simply general knowledge that you have about your emotional propensities.

For our purposes it is important that we not only anticipate how an object would look if the conditions of perception change, but also anticipate the diminishing and extinction of our perceiving of an object under some changes of these conditions. For if it seems to us that an object can be perceived better if some factors change, it also seems to us that an object can be perceived worse if those factors change differently. The improvement and worsening of our perception has a limit. If, for example, I move closer to an object I will see its colour better, there will be a distance to the object where I see the colour as best as it can be seen for my purposes. If I go even closer, the colour will go out of focus. My perceiving the object contains anticipations to this effect. There is, then, a positive maximum of perception (“Maximalpunkt”) of perceiving that is also a turning point: if you go beyond the point your perception of the object worsens. Footnote 16 There is also a worst point of perception (“Minderungsgrenze”) beyond which we lose perceptual contact with the object. Footnote 17

In his 1907 Husserl spends paragraphs 35 to 38 to resolve the tension between the idea that there are maxima and minima of perception and his view that there is no adequate perception of an object. Yes , there is no adequate perception: we can’t perceive the object as it is because we can only perceive it in adumbrations. But there is still a maximum of perception. For our human constitution and interests determine maxima and minima of perception. By nature perception is a process that cannot result in adequate perception, but there is best perception for beings like us relative to a given interest in the object perceived.

In a perceptual experience of an object, we anticipate how our perceiving of the object will improve as well as how it will worsen with respect to such a limit. Because we anticipate our perceiving of an object to worsen if certain factors change and approximate a minimum or improve until a turning point is reached, there is an experiential difference between an experience as of an object ‘decaying’ and an experience as of an object persisting beyond the limits of perception. If we experience the fulfillment of such ‘negative anticipations’, it seems to us that we cease to perceive a persisting object.

5 A minimal notion of objective experience

The last section suggests that an experience as of an object is an objective experience if, and only if, it involves anticipations about how it can be improved and worsened in relation to a maximum (minimum).

For an experience to be objective it is not necessary that one actually experiences the fulfillment of such anticipations. The anticipations are enough to have an objective experience. Footnote 18 Why? Because of the anticipations, it seems to us that if some conditions of our present perceiving change beyond a limit, our perception of the persisting object will diminish and finally cease. This seeming and not its actual fulfillment makes for perceptual objectivity.

To see the point of this clarification of the notion of an objective experience consider an ‘experience’ in which something seems mind-dependent to you. You have tinnitus. You hear a ringing ‘in your ears’ for an hour. When you are aware of the ringing, you don’t have perceptual anticipations. The auditory experience does not seem to become better or worse in response to changing conditions of perceptions. There is nothing like the experience of fulfillment of positive or negative anticipations. Footnote 19 There is no experiential distinction between your awareness of the ringing becoming fainter while your experience is clear and your experiencing worsening while the ringing persists unchanged. You may have inductive knowledge that the ringing stops after roughly 30 min or that the extent and intensity of it depends on your blood pressure. Such inductive knowledge will enable you to predict how and when the ringing will persist, but such expectations are not perceptual anticipations. It does not seem to you that the ringing will soon stop or get more intense; you have propositional knowledge about changes of your experience, but this is not a case of perceptual objectivity.

The notion of objective experience discussed so far minimal because it leaves open substantial questions about perceptual objectivity. To see this compare it with Siegel following explication of what she calls an experience with perceptual phenomenology:

An experience is perceptual if it seems to one that if one moves one’s sense-organ, one’s perspective on the [odor/thing seen] can thereby change. (Siegel 2006 , 401)

An experience has perceptual phenomenology if experience represents an object as independent from the perceiver, roughly, as out there to be met. If I have an after-image, I have no perspective that seems to change in response change to movements of my sense-organs.

According to Siegel’s necessary condition for objective experience, only experiences which can make us aware of changes in spatial relations between us and the object perceived can be objective. For the movement of our sense-organs changes spatial relations between the object of perception and these organs. Now, there are no doubt anticipations relating to distance and orientation involved in many objective experiences. If sensory experience had no spatial content, we could, for example, not experience some changes in how things seem to us as changes of distance or orientation etc. Footnote 20 But is it part of our concept of experiential objectivity that an experience is only objective if we have anticipations of how the object would appear to us when we change the orientation or distance to it? According to the minimal notion, the answer is NO. An objective experience is an experience that comes with anticipations about improvement and worsening in response to changes of some conditions. But it does not identify these changes as movements of the sense-organs or, more generally, changes in spatial relations. The conditions may be non-spatial.

Here is an example that makes the minimal condition plausible. In colour constancy the colour of an object ‘looks differently’ under different illumination ‘without appearing to be different’ (Hopp). Now, the illumination may change without you moving your sense-organ. To make this vivid consider a situation in which you can only stare at the coloured surface without changing your orientation towards it or even moving your eyes. If your perception of the object contains perceptual anticipations of how the surface colour will look better or worse if more or less light is on it, you have an objective perception of it. Footnote 21 The surface colour seems to persist beyond the limits of your perceiving, although the limits are not approached by moving your sense-organs. Imagine further that you are able change the ambient light without moving any of your sense-organs . If you change the light, some of your anticipations will be satisfied or disappointed; the colour looks as you anticipated it would look. Now, if your anticipations are fulfilled or disappointed in this situation, they are not anticipations about how the perception of the surface will be improved/worsened in response to movements of a sense-organ. For your sense-organs have not moved and, hence, anticipations that involve their movement cannot be fulfilled or disappointed. Yet, the anticipations that you have seem to suffice to make an experiential difference between ceasing to see a constant colour and seeing a colour fading away. You will of course also have perceptual anticipations that concern improvements/worsening of perception in response to movements of your sense-organs. But the example shows that it is not part of our conceptual understanding of an objective experience that such an experience ‘comes with’ anticipations relating to changes in space.

The last point can be strengthened by considering a case in which we cannot have anticipations about improvement/worsening of our perceiving in response to movements of our sense-organs. Imagine that you hear a melody. Husserl brings out that a form of anticipation is involved here:

While the first tone is sounding, the second follows, then the third. Are we not forced to say: when the second tone sounds, I hear it, but no longer the first? Therefore I never really hear the melody, but only individual tones. (Husserl 1928 , 385; my translation)

We hear the melody and in order to do so we must still ‘hear’ the tone that we heard before when it no longer sounds. We hear the tone as the same, although it ‘fades out’ and appears therefore differently. Here we have at least a prima facie case of an objective (auditory) experience in which our anticipations don’t concern movement of sense-organs. We anticipate a different, less clear appearance of the tone as time passes, independently of the movement of any sense-organ. The object of the perception is the same, but our perceiving of it approaches a temporal limit. Whether we indeed have an objective experience in this case should be assessed in the light of further reasons and not simply be ruled out by our notion of objective experience. The minimal notion allows us to assess these cases and is therefore preferable. It does not commit us to hold that the objects of experience need to have a spatial location. For example, it is an open question whether a sound has a spatial location; yet it can be the object of an objective experience.

6 Further limits of perception

Husserl provided the main conceptual tools to understand perceptual constancy. In the previous section we used, following Duncker’s example, these tools to shed light on the notion of an objective experience. But appealing to perceptual anticipations and fulfillments is insufficient to capture the full range of perceptual experiences in which an object seems mind-independent to us. For not only do we have experiences of a persisting object going out of ‘view’, we also have the experience of an unseen object coming into ‘view’. When I turn the corner, I have an experience of encountering the car that was there all along; I don’t have an experience of the car coming into existence. This cannot easily be explained with the same apparatus that was introduced for perceptual constancy. There is no extended perceiving in which intervening factors seem to change, sometimes beyond ‘breaking point’. There is an onset of a perceptual experience in which something seems to be already there.

This kind of experience is discussed in detail by Conrad -Martius:

[I]f we posit the case that we turn around in unfamiliar surroundings, the now newly perceivable objects are not “suddenly” there without any intuitive relation to the previously perceived objects, simply added to them. Rather the in peculiar way empty spatial reality which was previously co-given [mitgegebene] with the sphere of perception fills itself with them. (Conrad -Martius 1916 , 381; my translation)

Even if the scene before my eyes is occupied by a house, the space beyond the house is co-given but not seen. It seems, therefore, that I encounter something that occupied a location that exists independently of my perception when I walk around the house and see the parked car beyond it. In order for us to have such perceptions, we must be aware of space although we don’t see it.

Conrad Martius argues that the co-givenness of something beyond the limits of one’s perceiving is a general feature of how the external world is given to us in perception:

In all cases where I am at all directed into the external world, I am directed with my intuition somewhat over the limits of my sphere of perception. (Conrad Martius 1916 , 381)

How must experience be like to be directed beyond its own limits? Space seems not to end where our perceiving ‘gives out’. We have such experience because the limits of perceiving are manifest to us in perception: Duncker gave a good description of this phenomenon as the limits of perceiving ‘presenting themselves’ to us:

The limit of participation does not, in general, present itself as a sharp contour, but as a peculiar reaching-no-further, of which we frequently do not become conscious until new objects enter. (Duncker 1947 , 511)

When it seems to me that there is white vase in front of me, it also seems to me that there is more to be seen to the left, right and behind the vase, but my perceiving does not reach that far. It is part of the phenomenal character of our experience that it seems to us to have limits and that these limits are not limits of the objects of perception. Footnote 22 It seems that scene before our eyes does not stop where our vision cannot reach. Footnote 23 Again, this is not a belief in unseen regions of space, but a perceptual seeming. In the figure on the previous space, it just looks as if there is part of the figure hidden from view.

With this in mind, we can make sense of the kind of experience that has so far escaped us. We have the experience of a formerly unperceived object coming into view and not of an object coming into existence, because we are aware of the limits of our perceiving and now experience a change in the limits of perception, not in the world we perceive.

There is, then, an analogy between the two cases of object constancy. In both cases, we experience the limits of our faculty. Once we experience some enabling condition for perception changing beyond a limit, we experience a change in the limit of our perceiving such that something which was located in a region beyond our previous limit is now within the new limit, either because the object or we changed location. In general, our awareness of our limits of our perceiving enables us to have experiences of objects as mind-independent.

7 Conclusion

Objective experience is a matter of limits of perception being perceptually manifest in the perception they are limits of. In some experiences, we are aware of an object and how the limits of our receptivity bear on our experience. If this idea is along the right lines, things are given to us as mind-independent before we have acquired the corresponding concept of a mind-independent object. Human and nonhuman animals can therefore both have objective experiences. Hence, they experience the world as containing persisting mind-independent objects. The picture of the world as containing mind-independent particulars with ‘biographies’ is our natural starting point because it is how we experience the world. A revisionary metaphysics that dispenses with objects of this kind beggars belief because it does not sit with our experience of the world.

I borrow the example from Siegel 2006 , 402.

Duncker, Linke and Conrad-Martius will figure later in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception . In this paper I will focus on the former authors.

According to the editor of Duncker’s paper, the paper was written in the 1930s.

See Conrad -Martius ( 1916 , 413) and Duncker ( 1947 , 509).

Thanks to a referee for helping me to improve these sections.

See also Smith ( 2002 ), 175. Burge ( 2010 , 408) takes perceptual constancies to be capacities whose exercises need not be conscious perceptions in which, for example, an object/feature appear different yet manifestly the same. Because Burge is not concerned with how things seem to the perceiver, but with the states of a subpersonal system, I will set his account aside in this paper. See Campbell ( 2011 , 272-3) for criticism of Burge’s conditions for perceptual objectivity.

Duncker ( 1947 , 541) himself argued that a more satisfactory explanation of phenomenological object-constancy can be given by appealing to a number of facts about voluntary movements. For example, the voluntary act of opening your eyes is not experienced as causing a change in the properties of the objects that come into view. However, such facts seem to be too contingent to yield a general explanation. There is nothing like voluntarily opening your ears. Yet a being that had only auditory experiences could still experience some objects of perception as mind- independent.

Katz took courses with Husserl from 1904 to 1906; see Schuhmann ( 1977 , 80). Husserl read and commented on Hering’s work in 1909, in connection with the dissertation of his student Heinrich Hofmann; see Hofmann ( 1919 ) (see Schuhmann 1977 , 129ff).

Husserl frequently describes perception of an object interpretation of non-intentional sensations or ‘hyletic data’ (see, for example, Husserl 1913b II/1, § 2). Husserl’s dichotomy between data and interpretation gives rise to a number of exegetical and systematic questions (see, for instance, Linke 1928 , § 68). Are hyletic data elements of our sub-personal or personal psychology? How does interpretation work? Are the sensations ‘building stones’ out of which a perception of objects is constructed, as Duncker ( 1947 , 517 Fn.) and Burge ( 2010 , 130) think? Or are they posterior abstractions from a perceiving, as a more charitable reconstruction might hold? For the purposes of this essay we can set these questions aside. Dunker and Linke, for example, follow Husserl in taking perceptual constancies to hold the key to understanding objective representation, yet explicitly reject that objective experiences are constructed or derived from something prior.

On this see Madary ( 2010 ), 148.

See Husserl ( 1913b ) II/2, 40–1.

See Husserl ( 1904 /5), 50. Husserl ( 1904 ), 36–7

See Smith ( 2002 ), 135. Kelly ( 2010 ) goes a substantial step further and argues that one must be driven to get a better ‘perceptual grip’ on the object.

See Mulligan ( 1995 ), 204.

See Madary 2010 , 149.

See Husserl ( 1904 /5) § 14.

See Husserl ( 1907 ), 107.

See Husserl ( 1913b ), II/2, 41. See also Siegel ( 2006 , 401), who stresses that for what she, following Smith ( 2002 ), calls ‘perceptual consciousness’, it is sufficient that something looks as if one’s experience of it will change under certain conditions.

Sometimes rainbows are listed as sensory or mind-dependent objects. See Evans ( 1982 , 263). Our experience of a rainbow comes with perceptual anticipations, but these anticipations will be disappointed. The rainbow looks like something out there to be met in space, but it isn’t.

See Cassam 2014 , 166.

According to Smith, spatial relations are indirectly involved in colour constancy: ‘[T]he varying sensations indicate to us a changing relation to the perceived object to something else in space ’ (Smith 2002 , 175). There is more light over here than over there. So light seems to occur in spatial regions in various quantities and we experience the object to the light that surrounds it . While plausible, this does not help to defend the account of perceptual consciousness in terms of movement of sense-organs. I am grateful to a referee for making me think more about the relations involved in perceptual constancy.

See Soteriou ( 2011 , 193).

See Soteriou ( 2011 , 193) and Richardson ( 2009 , 238).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Bill Brewer for very helpful written comments and discussion and to Dominic Alford-Duguid and David Jenkins for helpful comments. I presented a forerunner of the paper in a summer seminar in King's College: many thanks to all participants for their feedback. I owe special thanks to two referees who both provided extensive comments which led me to rethink the paper.

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Textor, M. Perceptual objectivity and the limits of perception. Phenom Cogn Sci 18 , 879–892 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9570-2

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Perception: Essays after Frege

Charles Travis, Perception: Essays after Frege , Oxford University Press, 2013, 420pp., $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199676545.

Reviewed by Keith A. Wilson, University of Sussex

Charles Travis's new collection on perception brings together eleven of his previously published essays on this topic, some of which are substantially revised, plus one new essay. The intentionally ambiguous subtitle hints at the author's endorsement of Fregean anti-psychologism, though influences from Wittgenstein and Austin are equally apparent. The work centres around two major questions in the philosophy of mind and perception. First, Travis argues against the view that perceptual experience, as distinct from perceptual judgement or belief, is representational, and so belongs to what Travis calls 'the conceptual'. This is contrasted with the 'non-conceptual', or 'historical'; that is, environmental particulars which lack the generality of representational thought. [1]  The second is what Travis calls 'the fundamental question of perception'; namely, how can perceptual experience make the world bear (rationally) upon what we are to think and do? The answer, he argues, cannot be found in terms of relations  between  thoughts -- a purely conceptual affair -- but in the way that thought is itself grounded in the particularity of experience. For perceptual experience to bear rationally upon thought at all -- or, in more familiar Fregean terms, to bring 'objects' under 'concepts' -- perception must first make environmental particulars available to cognition. Thus, Travis argues, experience cannot itself be 'conceptual', or representational, on pain of undermining the very thing that grants us a recognisable, and so thinkable, world at all.

The twelve essays, presented in order of their composition, and spanning almost a decade, develop these central themes in different and sometimes surprising ways. In Essay 2, for example, we learn that Frege is not only the father of modern logic, but of disjunctivism, and that claims concerning sense data are, according to Frege's notion of thought, not truth-evaluable. Whilst Travis's prose can be dense and heavy going at times, it is rarely entirely obscure or impenetrable, and rewards patient study. Since each essay is intended to be self-contained, there is an inevitable element of repetition, particularly of the central Fregean claims (set out most explicitly in Essay 9), though this is generally more helpful than redundant. The overall impression is that of a thinker approaching his subject matter from a variety of different directions in order to construct a detailed and comprehensive map of the territory -- albeit one that will seem unfamiliar to those more accustomed to the prevailing representationalist tradition.

The essays also help to situate Travis's thought in relation to other philosophers in the field, including, though not limited to, John McDowell (Essays 1, 4, 6 and 8), Christopher Peacocke (Essays 1 and 5), Gareth Evans (Essays 5 and 10), Wittgenstein (Essay 3 and throughout), Ayer (Essay 3 and 7), Putnam (Essay 6), Anscombe (Essay 7), Kant (Essay 8), Tyler Burge (Essay 9), Jerry Fodor (Essay 10), H. A. Prichard and Thompson Clarke (Essay 11), and Moore (Essay 12). I will restrict myself to commenting on just a few of these, though the themes are characteristic of the whole.

'The Silences of the Senses'

Essay 1, a revised version of Travis's 'The Silences of the Senses' (2004), targets the view that visual experiences have representational content -- something Travis argues to be a kind of category mistake. To perform the role representationalists assign to such content in the formation and justification of judgements and beliefs -- in the simplest case, endorsing it 'at face value' -- perceptual experiences must, Travis argues, have personal-level content that is 'recognisable' to the subject. [2]  Whilst the relevant notion of recognisability is never fully explained, a subsequent essay suggests the minimal condition that the subject is able to grasp, though not necessarily elucidate, what it would take for that experience to be accurate or veridical. To qualify as representation  to  the subject ('allorepresentation'), visual experiences must identify some particular way for the world to be; i.e., they must have objective truth or accuracy conditions. Travis's  argument from looks , as I will call it, then aims to show that such conditions cannot be discernible on the basis of perceptual appearances alone since (a) visual looks are comparative, and so do not identify any objective way for the world to be, and (b) epistemic, or 'thinkable', looks are not purely perceptual, and so cannot make the relevant content available solely on the basis of what is visually available to the subject in experience. This presents representationalists with the following dilemma: either (i) they must offer some further notion of looks that combines elements of both visual and thinkable looks, a task which Travis argues is impossible, or (ii) perceptual contents are not recognisable on the basis of visual appearances alone, in which case precisely what are they recognisable on the basis of?

One possible response to the first horn of this dilemma is to claim that 'non-comparative' or 'phenomenal' looks (Jackson 1977; Byrne 2009) are capable of making the relevant contents recognisable. However, such content is arguably only capable of representing the phenomenal features of experience itself, and not the states of external objects, thus undermining its supposed justificatory role. [3] Furthermore, this response is rendered dialectically ineffective by the availability of purely comparative analyses of phenomenal looks (Martin 2010; Brewer 2013).

A response to the second horn might attribute the relevant recognisability to the external individuation of higher-order states (cf. Burge 1988), or the action of conceptual capacities (McDowell 2008). However, standard accounts of privileged access do not translate well to the case of perceptual experience, which is not self-verifying in the manner of higher-order thought, and the relevant capacities might equally well be ascribed to judgement or belief as to experience  per se , undermining the representationalist position.

Finally, one might choose to reject Travis's requirement that experiential contents must be 'recognisable' (Burge 2010). However, this places severe constraints upon the role that such content can play in the conscious life of the perceiver, negating much of the intuitive appeal of view according to which the subject can simply  tell  of any given perceptual experience what it represents. Whilst it is unclear why this issue could not be addressed by externalism about justification or cognitive availability of perceptual content in a way that is consistent with the central claims ofrepresentationalism, this would itself be an interesting consequence of Travis's argument.

The revised 'Silences' improves upon the original in several respects. The terminology has been updated to forestall the misunderstanding (cf. Byrne 2009; Siegel 2010) that it concerns the lack of any sense of the English 'looks' that captures the representational content of visual experience. Rather, Travis intends to engage with the metaphysics and justificatory role of visual appearances, or looks, and not merely their semantics. In place of 'looking like' and 'looking as if', we now find 'visual looks' and 'thinkable looks', which roughly correspond to Chisholm's (1957) 'comparative' and 'epistemic' uses, respectively. Gone, too, are the references to 'demonstrable looks' that formed a confusing and unnecessary feature of the original. The result provides a substantive and powerful, albeit not wholly decisive, objection to many standard representational views of perception that has yet to be adequately addressed by their proponents. (It also highlights an important distinction between the question of what  individuates  perceptual content, which has received much attention in the recent literature, and the question of its  availability  to the subject, which has not. Moreover, any view that posits different responses to these two issues will need to explain how the resulting contents remain in step, since if they can come apart then this opens up the possibility that we can be mistaken about how things appear to us in virtue of mistaking the content of our visual experiences. This contradicts the commonly held view that visual appearances are the sort of thing to which the appearance-reality distinction does not apply, yielding a further objection to the representational view.)

'Unlocking the Outer World'

In Essay 8, 'Unlocking the Outer World', the only entirely new piece in the volume, Travis considers the related question of how the representational content of experience could ( per impossibile ) come to have a 'general shape' -- propositional or otherwise -- that is suitable for judgement. According to McDowell (2008), simply assuming that experience delivers such content without explaining how it is structured by the operation of the same cognitive faculty that is employed in judgement would be to fall prey to 'the Myth of the Given'. One way of avoiding the Myth, if it is such, endorses a particular reading of Kant's slogan that "The same function which gives unity to the various ideas ( Vorstellungen ) in a judgement also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various ideas in an intuition ( Anschauung )". [4]  Whilst McDowell's interpretation of this passage as involving a single faculty or capacity is controversial, it is sufficiently widespread to make a useful target. Against this view, Travis presses two Fregean points.

Abstracting somewhat from the details of Travis's argument, in order to move from the 'inner' world of subjective sense impressions -- themselves subjective ideas ( Vorstellungen ) in the mind of some particular perceiver -- to the 'outer' world of thought, the relevant  Vorstellungen  must be brought under a concept (i.e., a rule). But according to Frege's anti-psychologism, thought ( Sinn ) requires objective import, and so some objective criterion that determines whether particulars fall under the corresponding concept. However, argues Travis, there can be no objective criterion for whether  Vorstellungen , which are purely subjective, fall under such a concept, and so no such concept. The structuring or unification of perceptual content cannot therefore be a result of the application of concepts (in Frege's sense), and so McDowell's interpretation of Kant's slogan is untenable. Call this  Frege's  private language argument  (FPLA).

The difficulty with this argument is that it neglects two important features of Kant's transcendental idealism. First, it is not obvious why we should think of categorial concepts, such as space, time or propositional unity, on the model of Fregean empirical concepts. Rather, they are, for Kant, a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. If these did not correspond to any objective features of the world at all -- something that is doubtful, even under transcendental idealism -- then neither would the resulting judgements. However, it does not follow from this that there can be no such concepts. Provided that the relevant criterion holds for all suitably equipped perceivers, why should such 'concepts' require purely objective truth conditions? Just as Frege apparently held that first-personal thoughts involve a mode of presentation that is uniquely available to the thinker (a point that Travis discusses at length in Essay 9), categorial concepts may yield modes of presentation -- of space, time, sensations, etc. -- in ways that are uniquely accessible to each individual perceiver. Unlike Frege's case of Dr. Lauben, the existence of an  intersubjective  criterion of application, perhaps in virtue of our common evolutionary heritage, would be sufficient to make the resulting judgements possible. No doubt Travis would object to this on the basis that such judgements would be incapable of revealing an objective mind-independent world, but this hardly seems an objection to Kant, who in any case argues that transcendental idealism is compatible with empirical realism (Kant 1781/1789: A370).

Travis's primary target, however, is not Kant, but McDowell, whom he sees as illicitly appealing to a common unifying function between thought and perception that not only does not, but could not, exist. Travis's argument against McDowell is twofold. First, McDowell, unlike Frege, misdiagnoses the problem. There is no need for a unifying function since no unifying is required. Thoughts are not  built up  out of a series of component parts, such as concepts. Rather, these 'parts' are themselves  decompositions  of thoughts -- Frege's 'context principle' -- which admit of many such possible decompositions. McDowell's solution to the Myth is therefore misguided. Second, no amount of unifying  within  the conceptual domain can explain how environmental particulars, i.e., perceptible objects, are brought under concepts. Rather, this is a matter of relating the 'non-conceptual', or historical,  to  the conceptual. Travis goes on to argue that a capacity for judgement necessarily involves being able to tell whether some particular -- e.g., the pig snuffling under the oak --  instances  a concept; e.g., of something snuffling. A sensitivity to what would count as such an instance under the relevant circumstances, i.e., 'occasion sensitivity', is therefore of the essence of judgement. But McDowell allows no room for such sensitivity, since the relevant content is already fixed by experience, which is conceptual (though not propositional). Thus any subsequent endorsement of this content is no longer recognisably an act of judgement.

The effectiveness of this argument turns upon (i) precisely what we take the role of perception to be, and (ii) how much stock we place upon Travis's notion of occasion sensitivity (cf. Travis 2008). On a 'thin' view of experience, perception merely makes environmental particulars available for cognition in thought and judgement, and so it seems we should reject McDowell's conceptualism. On a 'thick' view of experience, however, perception involves the detection of generalities, thereby diminishing the role of judgement. That  the pig is snuffling, Travis and Frege agree, is not an object of perceptual awareness -- it is a proposition, not a pig -- and so any view according to which perception consists in 'taking in facts' must be grounded in sensitivities to the relevant environmental particulars.

One might worry that this debate descends into a purely terminological dispute over the meaning of 'experience' and 'judgement', with each side differing only on at which point conceptual capacities come into play. Whilst this is certainly part of what is at stake, such a worry underestimates the structural differences between the two views, each of which assigns different roles to cognition and to the 'reach' of our rational capacities (Essay 4). The resulting exchange, which continues a long-running debate between Travis and McDowell, helps to sharpen our understanding of these issues, highlighting potential opportunities for further philosophical and empirical work in these areas, for example in defining the nature of the relevant conceptual capacities.

'Desperately Seeking ψ'

In Essay 9, 'Desperately Seeking ψ', Travis turns his attention to Burge's (2005) dismissal of disjunctivism on the grounds that it is "directly at odds with scientific knowledge" -- a claim that, as Travis puts it, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The essay is as much concerned with belief as with seeing, and argues that Burge's view is incompatible with Fregean doctrines concerning the essential publicity of thought. The argument focuses upon Burge's commitment to the existence of a 'common factor', or representational content -- the eponymous ψ -- between subjectively indistinguishable experiences of the following kinds:

(i)    Perception, e.g., Sid, on esplanada , seeing Penelope Cruz (Travis's example); (ii)    Illusion, e.g., Sid having a perfect illusion as of seeing Penelope Cruz, but in which Penelope is replaced by a visually indistinguishable body-double; and (iii)    Hallucination, e.g., Sid having an experience indiscriminable from that of seeing Penelope Cruz, but in which no seeing actually takes place.

On Burge's view, each of the above cases will involve the representation of type-identical content, despite the objects of Sid's experience being quite different, or indeed there being no such object in case (iii). [5] Disjunctivism, as Travis defines it, consists in the denial that there is any such ψ, and so any common factor. This is incompatible with Burge's 'Proximality Principle', which takes the total antecedent psychological state of the individual along with proximal inputs to the relevant perceptual systems, i.e., ψ, to be "implicit in causal explanation of all reasonably well-developed empirical perceptual theories that I know of" (Burge 2005, p. 22). Assuming no deficit in Burge's knowledge of these areas, the result is not a happy one for disjunctivism. [6]

Travis's strategy here is to drive a wedge between Burge's psychological account of perceptual states and Frege' logical one, claiming that Burge illicitly slides from the former to the latter. For ψ to be the content of some possible thought, it must be both  singular , i.e., its truth requires the presence of the relevant historical individuals -- in this case Penelope -- and  essentially public , as per FPLA. However, whether a thought is singular or general is, according to Travis, a function of its decomposition, and not a property of the thought itself. Moreover, since ψ is consistent with the presence or absence of various objects -- cases (ii) and (iii), respectively -- then it cannot entail conscious awareness of those objects. It is, as Travis puts it, a mere Vorstellung , or subjective idea, in the mind of some particular perceiver.

Travis's argument here is complex and concerns a disagreement over the individuation of a particular kind of psychological state, which for disjunctivists will be externalist, versus what fixes its content, which, for Burge, will be anti-individualist (e.g., concerning historical facts about the evolution of the human visual system). Considerations of space preclude detailed discussion, but that ψ is not itself sufficient for a thought or perception of Penelope,  qua  a particular historical individual, does not rule out its being an ingredient in such a state (something Travis also considers, but dismisses somewhat peremptorily). This of course raises the question of what else, other than the presence of the relevant object, would be required to yield awareness. However, since Burge is not concerned with conscious awareness  per se  -- indeed, he claims that it plays no essential role in perceptual representation -- it is unclear why this should constitute a objection to his view, or indeed why the notion of thought is appropriate here (a point Travis himself makes, albeit in a different context).

The main problem with the essay, however, is one that runs throughout the book, and concerns its avowedly Fregean underpinnings. Here, as elsewhere, Travis rests considerable weight upon what Frege 'showed' or 'argued', but without providing us with the relevant arguments as he understands them. Apart from some brief quotations which state, but do not establish, the relevant claims, the reader is left to take it on trust that Frege's arguments establish beyond any doubt that thoughts, for example, must be independent of their individual bearers, or that the truth conditions for thought, and so perceptual representation, must be wholly objective (see above). Whilst Frege's views in the philosophy of logic and language will be familiar to most readers, the effectiveness of his arguments to establish these positions may be open to question. [7]  No doubt Travis intends for inconsistency with Fregean principles to constitute a form of  reductio  against his opponents, but it is unclear why we should go along with him in accepting Frege's view of thought as the only game in town. Of course, any alternative view will face a similar explanatory burden, but one might equally take Burge to be engaging in the project of establishing a philosophically respectable notion of objective representation, and so of thought, that enables reference to environmental particulars in a way that is consistent with central Fregean insights, albeit inconsistent with Travis's interpretation of them. Given this, it would be helpful to know precisely what Travis takes the decisive Fregean arguments to be, and why we should think of them as applying in the case of perception, which is not, by Travis's own lights, a form of thought at all. In a sense, this is the project of the book, but one in which some of the foundations appear to be missing.

This admittedly important flaw aside, however, the present collection makes a stimulating and original contribution to many debates in contemporary philosophy of perception. Travis's rehabilitation of Fregean anti-psychologism is a welcome and timely development, and the inclusion of new and updated material makes it a worthwhile addition to the genre. This is true not only for the philosophy of perception, where disjunctivism is already considered a serious contender by many, but in the philosophy of mind and psychology more generally, where talk of 'representation' has become very much the norm, often with little thought to its theoretical and conceptual underpinnings. Overall, this collection presents a coherent and impressive case against the prevailingrepresentationalist consensus, and is perhaps best read as setting the agenda for an alternative, non-representational understanding of perceptual psychology and the metaphysics of mind and consciousness. As such, philosophers of mind, language and perception will find much of interest here, both in terms of building upon Travis's previous work, and in opening up new lines of enquiry in the debates about perceptual content, representation and disjunctivism.

Brewer, Bill (2008). 'How to Account for Illusion'. In  Disjunctivism : Perception, Action, Knowledge , A. Haddock and F. Macpherson (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 168-80.

Burge, Tyler (1988). 'Individualism and Self-Knowledge'.  Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 85 (11), pp. 649-63.

--- (2005). 'Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology'.  Philosophical Topics , 33 (1), pp. 1-78.

--- (2010).  Origins of Objectivity . New York: Oxford University Press.

Byrne, Alex (2009). 'Experience and Content'.  Philosophical Quarterly , 59 (236), pp. 429-51.

Chisholm, Roderick M. (1957).  Perceiving: A Philosophical Study . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Glüer, Kathrin (2009). 'In Defence of a Doxastic Account of Experience'.  Mind and Language , 24 (3), pp. 297-327.

Jackson, Frank (1977).  Perception: A Representative Theory . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, Immanuel (1781/1789).  Kritik der reinen Vernunft . Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1956.

Martin, M. G. F. (2010). 'What's in a Look?'. In  Perceiving the World , B. Nanay (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 160-225.

McDowell, John (2008). 'Avoiding the Myth of the Given'. In  John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature , J. Lindgaard (ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1-14.

Travis, Charles (2004). 'The Silence of the Senses'.  Mind , 113 (449), pp. 59-94.

--- (2008).  Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected Essays . Oxford University Press USA.

[1]  Somewhat confusingly, non-conceptual representation also counts as ‘conceptual’ for Travis, as emerges in his discussion of Evans and Peacocke in Essay 5.

[2]  Something Burge (2010) strenuously denies.

[3]  Cf. Glüer (2009), and  pace  certain forms of reliabilism.

[4]  Kant 1781/1789: A79-80/B105-106.

[5]  Consequently, for Burge, such experiences will involve different  token  content, or perhaps no token content at all.

[6]  Of course, whether this outcome is forced by the central claims of disjunctivism, or indeed whether Travis’s and Burge’s views on representation are incompatible, remain open questions.

[7]   The Basic Laws of Arithmetic  I, p. XIX, being a case in point.

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Perception Essays (Examples)

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Perception personality and individual differences and ethics.

Perception, Personality and Individual Differences and Ethics The following pages focus on analyzing three articles on perception, personality, and individual differences and ethics. These issues were selected because of their importance to human interrelationships, influence on human behavior, and importance on communication. In order to understand how these concepts can be efficiently used, it is important to study articles that explain the processes behind these concepts, how they work, and how they can be improved. The articles presented in this paper represent the point-of-view of specialists in the field. Their opinion can be considered subjective. This is because their opinion was formed based on their individual knowledge and experiences. It is important to understand the motivation used by the authors of these articles in their attempt to provide a point-of-view on these issues. The issue of perception is of great importance to all target audiences. This is because everyone should have information on….

Reference list:

1. Hall, M. (2010). Perception is not Reality. International Society of Neuro Semantics. Retrieved May 25, 2013 from  http://www.neurosemantics.com/nlp-critiques/perception-is-not-reality .

2. Cruz, H. (2002). Personality Could Affect Bottom Line. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved May 25, 2013 from  http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-19/business/0203190214_1_american-savings-education-council-retirement-planning-Matthew-greenwald-associates .

3. Beaver, J. (2006). Individual Differences in Reward Drive Predict Neural Responses to Images of Food. The Journal of Neuroscience. Retrieved May 25, 2013 from  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/19/5160 .

Perceptions at a Party

Perceptions at a Party Different sensations from the environment are processed through sensory receptors, such as the eyes, ears, nose, skin and mouth, which are then perceived and processed in the brain to be organized and interpreted (Huffman, 2007). For the party example, several sensations are being processed through our sensory receptors. hen we arrive to the party, it is already dark outside, so when we enter the hosts' house, the amount of light within is very important. Luckily, the light is neither too bright nor too dim. Probably the first sensation our body would notice is smell. This rounds out our experience, perhaps because we have arrived hungry, and thankfully, the smell of delicious food is wafting through the air. If the house smelled unpleasant, such a cat litter box badly in need of scooping, our experience would be much less pleasant. hat is also interesting about smell is that….

Works Cited

Huffman, K. (2007). Psychology in action (8e): Chapter 4. Power Point Presentation, Department of Psychology, Palomar College, San Marcos, CA.

Weiten, W. (2005). Psychology: Themes & Variations, briefer version (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Perception of Customer Behavior

Perception of Customer Behavior The Psychological State of Consumer Behavior The psychological state of the customer plays an important part in determining the consumer satisfaction. The perception and behavior of the consumer has an impact on the service climate as well as customer perception of service equality. According to Benjamin Schneider, Suzan White and Michelle Paul in the journal of applied psychology (Schneider, White & Paul, 1998), a given set of foundation issues that usually holds up employee work and service worth is conceptualized as essential cause of a climate for service. The climate for service is also reflected in the customer services. A cutthroat international competition, slower growth and mature markets characterize the current environment for many businesses organizations. Therefore, various organizations are making the perceptions of customers of quality of service a priority to in order to stay competitive and retain customers. Apparently, it is relatively less expensive to keep a….

Hoyer, W.D., & MacInnis, D.J. (2008). Consumer behavior. Mason, OH: South-Western.

Kardes, F.R., Cronley, M.L., & Cline, T.W. (2011). Consumer behavior. Mason, OH: South-

Western, Cengage Learning.

Perception Within the Realm of

This explanation is problematic because once the rotation of the drum slows down the invariant disappears (Wertheim,1994). On the other hand the inferential theory asserts that moving retinal image creates a retinal signal, however when the eyes are stationary they create a zero extraretinal signal (Wertheim,1994). Thus, because the two signals are not equal and the drum is seen to move (Wertheim,1994). Consequently, when using the inferential theory of perception the criticism is that the drum appears to be stationary even after once vection is saturated (Wertheim,1994). Conclusion For the purposes of this discussion we focused on evaluating two fundamental approaches to explaining perception; Direct perception and Inferential Theory. We found that the direct perception theory describes an approach, which asserts that the visual world reveals itself as an organized pattern of light. This pattern, called the optic array, is composed of information because it has specific structural features, described as….

Knapp, T.J. & Robertson, L.C. (Eds.). (1986). Approaches to Cognition: Contrasts and Controversies. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=89378105 

Warren, R. & Wertheim, a.H. (Eds.). (1990). Perception & Control of Self-Motion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wertheim, a.H. (1994). Motion perception during self-motion: The direct vs. inferential controversy revisited. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (2): 293-355. / retrieved March 17, 2005 at  http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/63/bbs00000463-00/bbs.wertheim.html

Perception Is the Basis of a Human's

Perception is the basis of a human's ability to see, hear, and make sense out of these senses. The different types of perception include bottom-up processing, which researchers sometimes refer to data-driven processing, top-down processing, which is sometimes called conceptually driven processing. There are also different ways of viewing perception. An alternative theory believes there are two ways people use perception, the direct view, and the constructive view. Direct relates to the top-down method, while constructive relates to the bottom-up method. It is probably possible to function cognitively solely on one type of perception, but that would make for a very narrow and constricting view of the world. In reality, the two processes of perception actually compliment and aid each other, leading to a greater depth of perception and understanding as people attempt to make sense of the world around them. Just as perception relies on many senses, it relies on….

Basics of perception and awareness.

Perceptions About Muslims In the Past Few

Perceptions About Muslims: In the past few years, negative perceptions about Muslims have continued to grow and affected the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. As these relations are hugely affected, many Muslims across the globe are constantly fighting negative perceptions. These negative perceptions about Muslims and Islam in general have been stimulated by recent events in the Muslim and non-Muslim world. These events have continued to receive huge media coverage and generated a tremendous amount of mutual suspicion. One of the major reasons for the growth of negative views about Muslims by non-Muslims is that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence. Negative Perceptions about Muslims: The negative perceptions about Muslims have increased because of the negative media representations of these people and the negative attitudes towards them in various societies. The negative attitudes are in turn linked to the development of stereotypes, which affect social interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims. In some cases,….

Works Cited:

Danios. "All Terrorists Are Muslims…Except the 94% That Aren't." Loonwatch.com. Loonwatch.com, 20 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

Deane, Claudia, and Darryl Fears. "Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing." The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company, 9 Mar. 2006. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

Maher, Kate. "Social Interaction and Attitudes towards Australian Muslims: 'we' and 'they' Constructions." The Australian Sociological Association. TASA, 2009. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

Spencer, Robert. "Why Do Muslims Tolerate Jihadist Evil They Claim to Abhor?" Human Events: Powerful Conservative Voices. HUMAN EVENTS, 22 June 2006. Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

Perception and Attention

Perception is our own individual sense of the world we live in and it is comprised of our recognition of stimuli in the environment as well as actions made in response to these environmental stimuli (Cherry, 2012). The function and purpose of the process of perception is to provide us with information regarding the environment that is necessary for continued survival (Cherry, 2012). Furthermore, perception dictates the way our environment is experienced and it also provides the stage where we can choose different actions within the environment. Human perception is comprised of five distinct senses that provide the brain with different information about the world. These five senses are sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Proprioception is also a component of perception, which involves the brain effectively detecting changes occurring with regard to movement or position of the body (Cherry, 2012). Cognitive processes are also involved in perception, as they are….

Cherry, K. (2012). Perception and the Perceptual Process. Retrieved 18 March, 2012 from  http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/ss/perceptproc_10.htm .

Perceptions of Success by Non-Traditional Students Non-Traditional

Perceptions of Success by Non-Traditional Students Non-Traditional Students' Perceptions of Academic Support Needs Perceptions of the Adequacy of College Services by Non-Traditional Students This purpose of this paper is to review two studies relevant to the topic of the perceptions of non-traditional students about their programmatic and service needs as matriculated students in institutions of higher education. The first section reviews an article by Luzius and Webb (2002) on the satisfaction levels of non-traditional students with regard to library services at their institution. Luzius and Webb (2002) distributed a questionnaire to students on a public university that was designed to gauge satisfaction with library hours and resources. Luzius and Webb (2002) identified several potential improvements for library services. The second section reviews a comparative study of traditional and nontraditional students' identities and needs by Senter and Senter (1998). Using extant data, Senter and Senter (1998) compared the perceived needs of traditional and non-traditional….

Luzius, J. & Webb, B. (2002, Fall). Nontraditional students' library satisfaction. Library Philosophy and Practice, 5(1). Retrieved March 3, 2011, from University of Washington Libraries J. Gate Open Access at  http://www.openj-gate.org/Search/SearchResults.aspx?SearchTerm=%22nontraditional%20students%22&Field=All&res=10&type=0&sub=All&update=None&from=-1&to=2012&pr=2 

Senter, M.S. & Senter, R. Jr. (1998). A comparative study of traditional and nontraditional students' identities and needs. Journal of Student Affairs Research & Practice, 35(4). Retrieved on March 3, 2011, from University of Washington Libraries Web site Open J. Gate at  http://www.openj-gate.org/Search/SearchResults.aspx?SearchTerm=%22students%20identities%20and%20needs%22&Field=All&res=10&type=0&sub=All&update=None&from=-1&to=2012&pr=2

Perceptions of Foreign UK Retail

133). Marks & Spencer is currently met with a wide array of challenges, among which the emergence of the internationalized economic crisis which reduces the buying powers of the individuals, but also the incremental pressures for sustainable development. As the rest of the retailers, Marks & Spencer promotes its development through high levels of consumption, but given the unstable state of the environment, the governments militate for sustainable and limited consumption (Jones, Comfort and Hillier, 2007). Another challenge is constituted by the need to adapt to the cultural values in the regions into which it expands and opens new stores (Amine and Smith, 2009). Also, the organization deal with financial and legal challenges derived from the international feature of business, such as the competition with local purveyors or the ability to combine and centralize the losses and profits of its international subsidiaries (Graetz and Warren, 2006). 2.5. Perceptions of Thai consumers over….

References:

Amine, L.S., Smith, J.A., 2009, Challenges to modern consumer segmentation in a changing world: the need for a second step, Multinational Business Review, Vol. 17, No. 3

Arize, a.C., Chooekawong, P., Prasanpanich, V., 2000, Foreign trade behavior in Thailand: stable or unstable? American Economist, Vol. 44, No. 2

Chang, T., Liu, W.R., Thompson, H., 2002, the viability of fiscal policy in South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, ASEAN Economic Bulletin, Vol. 19., No. 2

Child, P.N., Heywood, S., Klinger, M., 2002, Do retail brands travel, the McKinsey Quarterly,

Perception Lenses Alice in the Wonderland Like

Perception Lenses Alice in the Wonderland Like Carroll's, "Alice In Wonderland" perception forms. In text, talk "perception lenses".... As personal standpoint influences opinion, discern "inference" "judgment"? As a final point, C. Wright Mills "Sociological Imagination." Like Carroll's, "Alice in Wonderland" perception forms. In text, talk "perception lenses".... As personal standpoint influences opinion, discern "inference" "judgment"? As a final point, C. Wright Mills "Sociological Imagination" Things do not exists out there; rather it is the mind of the individual who perceive the existing objects with its own set of mind. The lens of perception provides a practical view of the real world and also provides the guidance regarding how better we could relate ourselves with the world. Lens of perception is considered as a thing of utmost importance in the field of psychology and sociology. With the help of this lens of perception individuals often create a sense of reality. This suggests the fact that….

Chaffee, John, (2009). Thinking Critically, 10th edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN: 0495908819

Halpern, D.F. (1996). Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from Questia database:  http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=34635950 

Deducing with Sociological Imagination (n.d.). In www.cliffsnotes.com/. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from  http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/Deducing-with-Sociological-Imagination.topicArticleId-26957,a .

Perception Research Into Aspects of

The results of this study found that some negative bias towards a patient's socioeconomic standing -- particularly from less-experienced dental students -- can result in "differential treatment" (e.g., less attentive care) (Carson, 675). But by "heightening awareness" of potential biases (that are based on accent or perceived lower socioeconomic status, or on racism) among dental students, through educational initiatives, stereotyping and bias can be reduced if not eliminated (Carson, 678). Another suggestion (Carson, 678-79) in terms of ensuring the quality of treatment is to "inhibit social categorical thinking." This would require not treating the patient as "unique" but rather as a "collections of symptoms." orks Cited Carson, Lloyd, Drummond, John, and Newton, James. (2004). Social Perception in the Clinical Dental Encounter: The Matched-Guise Technique Re-Visited. Psychology and Health, 19(5), 667-683. Gabbard, Carl, Cacola, Priscila, and Cordova, Alberto. (2009). Is Perceived Motor Competence A Constraint in Children's Action Planning? The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 170(2), 151-158. Noland, Heather,….

Carson, Lloyd, Drummond, John, and Newton, James. (2004). Social Perception in the Clinical

Dental Encounter: The Matched-Guise Technique Re-Visited. Psychology and Health, 19(5),

Gabbard, Carl, Cacola, Priscila, and Cordova, Alberto. (2009). Is Perceived Motor Competence

Perceptions of Male and Female

it's been earned" (emphasis added) (Klawans, 2003, p. 32). In their synopsis of the movie, the producers report that, "Having been gunned down by her former boss (David Carradine) and his deadly squad of international assassins, it's a kill-or-be-killed fight she didn't start but is determined to finish! Loaded with explosive action and outrageous humor, it's a must-see motion picture event that had critics everywhere raving!" (Kill Bill Volume 1 Synopsis, 2005, p. 1). As noted above, critics in fact from just about everywhere have been raving about "Kill Bill, Volume 1" (and 2), but not necessarily in a positive fashion; the possible reasons for these negative assertions about Tarantino's work are discussed further below. Gender-Based Differences in the Perception of Violence According to Adler and Denmark (1995), there have been a number of theories advanced over the years concerning violent behavior based on various psychodynamic, social learning, cognitive, and family….

Adler, L.L. & Denmark, F.L. (Eds.). (1995). Violence and the prevention of violence. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Alleva, R. (2004, May 7). East Meets West: 'Goodbye, Lenin!' & 'Kill Bill-Volume 2.'

Commonweal, 131(9), 23.

Arsham, Hossein. (2002). Questionnaire Design and Surveys Sampling, SySurvey: The Online Survey Tool. Retrieved March 2, 2005 at http://ubmail.ubalt.edu/~harsham/stat-data/opre330Surveys.htm#rsi.

Perception Using the Gestalt Principle The Whole

Perception Using the Gestalt principle, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts," describe a preconceived perception of a college class, three details that you now know are different from your initial perception, and your continuing perception in spite of the details. In church and in convocation, announcements are made that affect you. Instead of falling asleep, you need to pay attention to them! Label and describe four techniques the speaker could use to keep your attention, Using Attention theory from Gestalt. You have come through stages of Piaget's cognitive development, in your professional beliefs and in your theological beliefs. Name and trace the development of any one of your beliefs through all four stages, giving at least one specific characteristic for each stage, using terms from the theory of Piaget. Even though you may not remember your cognitive development in every stage, trace what must have happened to you in….

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Perception Refers to Cognition I E

We cannot process information in the same manner because we have no prior knowledge of the object. erception organization refers to the way we process information or stimuli to make sense of what we are observing. We can thus give them meaning which we can understand easily. There are some important steps in perception organization or we can say types of steps we can take to reach a conclusion. These are: figure and Ground, Stereotyping, perceptual schemes, closure, proximity and similarity. Figure is what we immediately notice and it is the object of our attention. Ground is the area or stimuli surrounding that image. For example when a friends calls us from a distance, his voice becomes the point of focus while everything else around us like other people's voices become the ground. erceptual schemes are also used to make sense of information. These are based on appearance, social roles, interaction….

Proximity refers to how close something is to the other. And Similarity refers to how similar it is to something we already know. This is the perceptual organizational process which helps us finally reach a rich percept.

Gregory Robinson-Riegler and Bridget Robinson-Riegler. Cognitive Psychology: Applying the Science of the Mind, Second Edition, Allyn and Bacon. 2008

Perception L Jones in Order to Understand

Perception L. Jones In order to understand the reality of any complex situation, it is essential to understand basic critical thinking principles. In fact, without realizing that there are several "perceptual blocks" that most people harbour in their "view" of any situation, greatly improves one's probability of having an accurate understanding of the issues involeed -- espeically when that situation is highly charged with emotion, polarization, or conflict. One excellent example in my own life when I was highly influenced by perceptual blocks was my perception of the Israeli/Palestian problem. As a young person, I was greatly impressed by the story of the creation of the State of Israel. Indeed, the image of the beleagured state of the dispersed Jewish Tribes, especially following the horrors of the Second World War only buoued my impression of Israelis as "Exodus-like" (as in the Leon Uris Novel) idealists, forging a new, free land, where Jews the….

Can you help me with my stress concept analysis?

While stress is a commonly used term, it is a poorly defined term that can refer to a wide scope of things, depending on the context.  Generally speaking, stress refers to the person’s response to some sort of aversive stimuli or stressor, though stress can also be used to refer to the stimuli that causes the stress.  The perception of stress appears to be related to whether a person finds a particular stimulus to be overwhelming. Therefore, a stress concept analysis can have different meanings and is personalized for each person experiencing a particular stressor.  Generally, we....

Need ideas for analytical essay that applies to contemporary theories on low motivation in workplace.

One of the struggles facing anyone in a management situation is figuring out how to keep the workforce motivated.  In fact, working on developing management techniques requires concentrating on how to motivate people, whether it is directly focused on techniques that can increase motivation or simply focused on changing worker’s perceptions of leadership, which can either be motivating or demotivating, depending on the perception.  There are various different theories of motivation that are often used to describe what motivates workers, how to increase motivation, and how to avoid things that decrease employee motivation. 

Your analysis needs....

I was looking for help in writing my learning outcomes for population health nursing clinical using bloom taxonomy.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a way of using three hierarchical models to classify learning objectives.  Bloom’s taxonomy breaks learning down into three broad models based on learning styles: cognitive, affective, and sensory.  It then further divides each of these three larger categories into smaller areas. The cognitive domain is divided into knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  The affective domain is divided into receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing.  The sensory domain is divided into perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex overt response, adaptation, and origination. It can be helpful to keep these various....

Can you suggest some essay topics related to sociolinguistics and languages in Algeria for example?

While many fields of study seem to only have academic applications, sociolinguistics has many real-world applications.  Sociolinguistics examines how various cultural factors impact the use of language, not only in what languages are spoken by people in various groups, but also how that language is spoken by those people.  The various factors that can influence the language someone speaks or how they speak a language include, but are not limited to: gender , ethnicity, religion, status, level of education, age, and geographical distribution.  The primary languages spoken in Algeria are Algerian Arabic (Darja),....

Research Paper

Perception, Personality and Individual Differences and Ethics The following pages focus on analyzing three articles on perception, personality, and individual differences and ethics. These issues were selected because of their…

Perceptions at a Party Different sensations from the environment are processed through sensory receptors, such as the eyes, ears, nose, skin and mouth, which are then perceived and processed in…

Article Review

Perception of Customer Behavior The Psychological State of Consumer Behavior The psychological state of the customer plays an important part in determining the consumer satisfaction. The perception and behavior of the…

This explanation is problematic because once the rotation of the drum slows down the invariant disappears (Wertheim,1994). On the other hand the inferential theory asserts that moving retinal…

Perception is the basis of a human's ability to see, hear, and make sense out of these senses. The different types of perception include bottom-up processing, which researchers sometimes…

Mythology - Religion

Perceptions About Muslims: In the past few years, negative perceptions about Muslims have continued to grow and affected the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. As these relations are hugely affected,…

Perception is our own individual sense of the world we live in and it is comprised of our recognition of stimuli in the environment as well as actions made…

Article Critique

Perceptions of Success by Non-Traditional Students Non-Traditional Students' Perceptions of Academic Support Needs Perceptions of the Adequacy of College Services by Non-Traditional Students This purpose of this paper is to review two…

Research Proposal

133). Marks & Spencer is currently met with a wide array of challenges, among which the emergence of the internationalized economic crisis which reduces the buying powers of the…

Perception Lenses Alice in the Wonderland Like Carroll's, "Alice In Wonderland" perception forms. In text, talk "perception lenses".... As personal standpoint influences opinion, discern "inference" "judgment"? As a final point, C.…

The results of this study found that some negative bias towards a patient's socioeconomic standing -- particularly from less-experienced dental students -- can result in "differential treatment" (e.g.,…

it's been earned" (emphasis added) (Klawans, 2003, p. 32). In their synopsis of the movie, the producers report that, "Having been gunned down by her former boss (David…

Perception Using the Gestalt principle, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts," describe a preconceived perception of a college class, three details that you now know are…

We cannot process information in the same manner because we have no prior knowledge of the object. erception organization refers to the way we process information or stimuli to…

History - Israel

Perception L. Jones In order to understand the reality of any complex situation, it is essential to understand basic critical thinking principles. In fact, without realizing that there are several "perceptual…

Psychology Discussion

Essay on perception | psychology.

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After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Introduction to Perception 2. Phenomenological and Gestalt View on Perception 3. Perceptual Organisation 4. Transactional Approach 5. Depth Perception 6. Constancy 7. Perception of Movement 8. Development 9. Errors 10. Studies.

• Essay on the Studies on Perception

Essay # 1. Introduction to Perception:

Perception involves arriving at meanings often leading to action. In addition to the nature of the stimuli, and past knowledge, perception is influenced by many other factors. In this article, an attempt is made to present to the student a discussion of the various factors involved in attention and perception.

How exactly are we able to relate to discrete sensory experiences in order to see them as meaningful? In other words, how exactly does perception occur? At any time we are attending to a number of stimuli. For example even when we are listening to the teacher we are conscious of his voice, his movement, his appearance etc., but at the same time we respond to him as a single person. This shows that our response is integrated and organised to become meaningful. This process of organising and integrating discrete stimuli and responding to them meaningfully is known as perception.

In the early part of this century the structuralist view of perception was dominant. It held that just as consciousness could be neatly dissected into its component parts, so also could perceptual experiences. Thus, the phenomenon of perception was, for the structuralists, the sum of mere sensations and the meaning associated with it through experience.

Without the benefits of experience there can be no meaning attached to stimuli or to sensations, and thus, there can be no ‘perception’. The infant, therefore, is able only to receive sensory input; it is not able to ‘perceive’ anything meaningful. William James described the infant’s perceptual world as a “booming, buzzing confusion.”

However, what does this actually mean in terms of the process of perception? It means that the infant has to learn to differentiate between different sensory experiences. It has to learn to construct perceptual categories through which it can perceive the differences between various sights, sounds, smells and feelings.

The infant’s visual world is formless, shapeless and chaotic. The real physical categories that exist in the world like forms, sounds and colours have to be repeated a sufficient number of times to be perceived as distinct and separate impressions by the infant. In this way the infant learns to perceive forms and objects and associates them with various meanings in their context.

Essay # 2. Phenomenological and Gestalt View on Perception :

A view totally different from the one given above emerged from the writings of phenomenologists. Even in the earlier days, German writers and philosophers had differed on the concept of perception as resulting from a combination of discrete sensory stimulations compounded by experience. They had tended to take the view that perception is a total act not necessarily bearing total resemblance to external stimulus characteristics.

The process of perception is not totally logical but it is, to a large extent, phenomenological. The German philosophers made a distinction between physical reality and experienced reality or phenomenal reality. One’ fact of experience is that perceived objects are always perceived as one and not as assemblages or discrete pieces of sensory information.

The phenomenological writers tended to lay emphasis on the inner processes rather than just experience and stimulus characteristics. The phenomenological view gained popularity through the writings of Husserel Brentano and Carl Stumpf. The real landmark in phenomenology was the work of Ehrenfels on tonal qualities.

He emphasised the totality of experience in melodies. The total experience is something more than some of the individual elements and he gave the name Gestalt Qualitat to this. An example of the phenomenological process in perception can be clearly seen in our experience of illusions. This line of explanation and experimentation was further developed by gestalt psychologists.

The ‘gestalt psychologists’ experiments on animals and birds showed that even at birth there are certain perceptual categories and abilities already present. Riesen showed that chicks brought up in total darkness could immediately distinguish the shape of a grain on the floor when brought into the light.

More recently, experiments by Lipsitt and Siquel have shown that even- a few hours old human infants can distinguish between the sound of a buzzer and that of a bell. Thus the infant’s world is neither a confusion nor a chaos as it was earlier made out to be.

Of course, the infant cannot perceive all objects with the same depth of meaning and understanding as adults can. But certain fundamental perceptual and discriminatory abilities – called perceptual organisations-are built into animals and human beings from birth.

Furthermore, the gestaltists challenged the view that perceptions can be divided into component elements. According to the structuralists, perceiving a chair means dissecting it into the elements of shape, size and angles of the parts of the chair, bound together by meanings from previous experience.

To the gestaltists, this molecular view of the subject destroyed one’s understanding of the phenomenon of perception as a whole. They demonstrated how perceptual phenomena often could not be reduced to elements. The experience of watching a movie on a screen cannot be explained by analysing the series of still pictures that go to make it up.

Listening to a tune- or a particular tune- in one key still gives the experience of the same tune when listening to it in another key, although the elements in both cases are entirely different. This lead to their famous dictum that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – Gestalt Qualitat. – a unique quality of wholeness.

Essay # 3. Perceptual Organisation :

Animals and human beings are endowed with the capacity to organise and group stimuli which are ambiguous, confusing and novel, thus making them meaningful or sensible. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated the principles which affect and direct the organisation in order to make the stimulus a meaningful whole within the perceptual field.

Some of the well recognised principles which contribute to perceptual organisation are as follows:

Figure and Ground Relationship :

The basic principle behind perceptual organisation is known as figure and ground organisation. This phenomenon was originally demonstrated by Rubin. One of the most fundamental principles of organisation in the field of perception is distinguishing between the figure and the ground, i.e. the figure which appears against a background.

Gestalt psychologists claim that even in the simplest form of perception, the figure and ground factor operates. For instance, when one is reading these sentences the black letters are perceived against the white background. A flying aero plane, for example, stands out as a figure against the sky or the clouds around it which form its background.

Stimuli which are outstanding and striking in terms of colour, shape etc. come to the foreground to form the figure and the less important or less significant ones recede to the background. However, when there are several objects in the general field of awareness which have equally balancing qualities there may be a conflict and two or more figures may be formed. In such a case there will be a shifting of ground and figure. One part may become the figure at one moment and at the next moment the same may become the ground (see Fig.7.1).

Essay # 4. Transactional Approach to Perception:

The traditional watertight distinctions among different kinds of behaviour like learning perception, motivation are also being given up resulting in a tendency to look at human actions as involving an entire organism totally integrated and directed towards adjusting or adopting to certain environmental requirements.

This emerging view has led to a perspective called the transactional perspective or transactional approach. One of the pioneers in promoting this approach was Ames whose experiments on perception and perceptual illusions are well known.

The transactional approach to perception basically holds that any act of perception at any time is influenced by the past learning experience of the individual and looks at any perception as a transaction or an act of dealing with the environment and other stimulus situations and tries to structure one’s perception in a manner that is maximally approximate to the world of reality.

Some of the basic postulates of the transactional approach to perception are:

(A) Basically those who support this view hold that perception involves an active interaction between the perceiver and the environment, and in this, the past experience and learning of the individual plays a crucial role. Further they also hold that every new perception results in new learning.

(B) The final perception results from a process of active interaction, in which the individual operates on the environment. Thus interaction serves our adaptive function and in view of this they often use the term transactional functionalism.

(C) Such interactions are often unconscious and unknown to the individual resulting in sudden and spontaneous inferences – the role of the conscious process being insignificant.

(D) Transactions not only reflect the past and help us in drawing inferences about the past of the persons, but are also future orientations and the overall life orientations of people. Thus, it may be seen that the past .influence and the present, both are integrated and oriented towards the future.

Ames says that people perceive things, objects, persons and the environment not always as the latter are, but in such a way as to make them compatible with one’s own assumptions and beliefs already acquired, thus very often necessitating distortion of objective reality.

Ames designed a number of experiments using a variety of perceptual situations designed by him like the well-known rotating trapezoid and also what are well known as Ames room experiments. Some of the other postulates of this approach are, that perception follows a certain trend of development during childhood.

It is further claimed that perceptual illusions can be overcome through learning. Though far from being advocates of the typical learning theory approach, those who support the transactional view express the view that even space perception and depth perception are very much products of learning. Thus, they do not support a mechanical view.

What happens in perception is a projection of the perceiver’s own constructs about the stimulus situation with the intention of achieving one’s purpose in action. Thus there is a give and take relationship between perceiver and the perceived situation involving a compromise with the actual reality and one’s own propensity or desire to keep certain assumptions and beliefs constant. The transactional approach is still a loosely formulated approach on the basis of a variety of experiments carried out by different investigators.

One can clearly see the impact of other earlier views on human behaviour like psychodynamics, influences of past experiences, tendency to maintain equilibrium and constancy (dynamic-homeostasis) and phenomenology. The transactional approach in a way makes use of all these assumptions and integrates them. One may not call it a theory, but it certainly is an approach.

Essay # 5. Depth Perception:

One important aspect in perception is the perception of depth, the third dimension or distance we are able to perceive objects as being near or far off. The basic psychological mechanism cannot explain this. The question has been a perplexing one. One view holds that this ability is innate while the other holds that this is an acquired ability. We perceive one rupee coin as one with a depth. This is called the third dimension.

Empiricistic and Nativistic Views :

To have a better understanding of the phenomenon of depth one ought to consider the philosophies of empiricism and nativism. Their views emerged as a consequence of the certainties and uncertainties about human nature. Their key concepts regarding the mind contradict each other and yet remain as the supporting pillars of these views to this day. Empiricism claims that the mind at birth is like a ‘blank slate’ while nativism claims that it is like a ‘veined marble’.

John Locke was the first philosopher who suggested that the mind was initially a ‘tabula rasa’,i.e. it is like a smooth wax table upon which impressions of external events print themselves. This is the crux of empiricism.

Processes like perception and thought reflect the particular structure and dynamics of the world in which we happen to live. However, the basic mechanism through which printing or imprinting operates is by the principles of association, similarity, contiguity, etc. According to the empiricists impressions arrange and rearrange themselves to form the core of our perceptions.

We can see that this idea has shaped many modem systems of psychology. Wundt’s theory of introspectionism is bolstered by empiricism. Pavlov’s work on conditioning, Guthrie’s theory of contiguity, and Broadbent’s account of mental functioning in terms of information processing are all built on the philosophy of empiricism.

Other theorists like Leibnitz proclaimed that the mind is like a slab of marble with veins or streaks. His theory of knowledge was aimed against sensualism and empiricism. To Locke’s postulate “there is nothing in the mind which has not been in the senses” Leibnitz added except the intellect itself.

According to him intellect is present at birth and only gets shaped by experiences. It becomes obvious that nativism as a doctrine boldly proclaims the importance of innate factors in the development of an organism rather than the environmental or experiential ones. A lot of research findings of recent years are heading towards nativism.

Andrey’s books “The African Genesis” “The Territorial Imperative” have popularized a nativistic interpretation of man’s aggression and of his alleged tendency to defend his territory. Audrey believes that many of the modem man’s aggressive tendencies can be traced back to his meat-eating, weapon using ancestors.

Jung’s concept of archetypes leans heavily on nativism. Ethnologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen have shown a strong evidence for innate determination of species-specific behaviour. Another piece of nativistic evidence comes from the field of perception. T.G.R. Bower has found a striking evidence that form constancy, through the visual cliff experiment, is innate in human infants.

A circle seen at an angle is responded to as a circle and not as an ellipse. Gibson and others have provided evidence indicating that depth perception is innate in many species. Immense support to this doctrine is lent from oriental philosophy which has recently been invading the western scientific world. The oriental philosophers support nativism to the core. In the following discussion we see a clear swing towards nativism.

In Gibson’s experiment, the visual cliff consists of a wide sheet of transparent glass placed over a drop on the floor. Gibson and Walk showed that by the time infants could crawl, they would not crawl over the deep side of a visual cliff under any circumstances (see Fig.7.7). This is also true of most new-born animals, which refuse to cross over the cliff.

By the time they start crawling, however, human infants have had ample time to learn depth cues. White tested infant perception of depth prior to the crawling stage by noting eye-blink responses to a falling object in a transparent cylinder positioned over the infant’s face.

If the infants blinked it was assumed that they were responding to the change in distance rather than just the change in retinal size of the falling object which did not otherwise elicit a blink. White also observed that the eye-blink response and, therefore, distance perception-occurred only after eight weeks in the human infant.

Bower put even younger infants in an upright position in a chair and found that infants even as young as two-week old adopted defensive behaviour when seeing an object approach their faces. Eye-blinking, which in this case would not have served to protect them, did not occur, but there was clear eye widening, head retraction and the interposition of the hands between the face and the object.

Bower, thus, demonstrated a clear functional response to visual cues of distance alone, which, in a one-week old infant can be assumed to be unlearned.

Feature Analysis :

Our analysis of the perceptual process has indicated that in any instance the act of perception is influenced by two types of processes. On the one hand we have high level central and also psychological factors like expectations and motivations which do not originate from lower order sense impressions, even though they may be triggered off by them.This type of involvement of high level process is known as top-down processing.

On the other hand processes which originate from lower level physiological and stimulation information are known as bottom-up processing. In this context, psychologists refer to a term called ‘feature analysis’, explaining how these two types of processes operate.

Some psychologists hold the view that perceptual recognition is made possible because a particular set of neurons in the brain are activated, as and when they find an appropriate matter in the field of perception. This is like the phenomenon where only one tuning fork from among a row goes into vibration, when its corroborating match is set in motion.

This is the hierarchical feature detection model. But the difficulty with this model is that this would require a specific set of neurons or feature detection in our brain .Every corresponding sound or light stimulus should have such detectors.

Though it is now known that there are specific set of neurons for certain specific stimulus characteristics, the possibility of having an endless number of specific detectors is yet to be proved. Thus the correctness of this view depends on further achievements in neurology regarding the neuronal functions.

A different and perhaps more widely accepted view is that there occurs what may be called feature analysis. According to this view, the specific detection neurons are of such a type that they can operate in different combinations. For example, they may be recognised as a pair of vertical lines which are parallel with a horizontal line connecting the two in the middle.

Feature analysis involves the brain analysing experiences or perceptual contents into such sets and whenever such set or combination, is available for retrieval from neurons, then recognition occurs. This concept of feature analysis explains how people recognise stimuli and in addition, also provides a clue as to how different stimuli can be given a common interpretation.

For example, when we see different flowers, though we see them as different, we see them all as flowers. But what happens when a. combination of such detections stored in memory do not match with what is actually present? For example, it is very difficult for us or at least some of us to recognise cauliflower as a flower, though many stimulus characteristics resemble that of many other flowers.

It is here that the concept of feature analysis cannot explain, what happens, when the stimuli are ambiguous and are both similar and dissimilar to stored up combinations. It is here that one sees the limitations of bottom up processing theory. It is in this context that the top down processing comes into operation.

Top down processing is influenced by the context of stimuli which creates certain expectations or “expectancies.” We expect certain things to occur, under certain situations or contexts. These expectations based on past experiences and contextual factors, set in motion certain perceptual sets.

The role of expectancy in perceptual recognition was clearly demonstrated in an experiment by Palmer. Palmer showed his subject a scene of a kitchen. Then they were given a very brief exposure to two objects, one resembling a loaf of bread (context relevant) and another a mail box (context irrelevant). The two objects were of the same size and shape. But the subject recognised the loaf of bread more than the mail box, thus showing the influence of centrally aroused expectancy.

Motivation is another factor. The importance of needs in influencing process of perceptions has already been examined. The classical experiments of Brownes and others have already demonstrated the role of motivational factors and needs in the process of perception.

Normally in most acts of perception both top down and bottom up processes work together, each supplementing and complementing the other. Top down processing plays a more crucial role where the stimulus situations are ambiguous, or relatively unfamiliar.

The importance of top down processing will become clearer to the reader later when we discuss the role of “personality factors in perception”. A number of experiments have shown that our perception is very much influenced by the totality of our personality, and personalities have been classified even on the basis of perceptual styles or modes.

Essay # 6. Constancy in Perception:

When we think about perceptual experiences they seem to be incredibly paradoxical. We realise that we see mobility in stationary objects, immobility in moving objects, and see things which are incomplete as complete. The cues which are said to facilitate perception of distance can, at times, corrupt and distort the same.

Similarly, we are able to respond to a stimulus appropriately even with a distorted, wrong or absent retinal image. This contradicts the view that the retinal image is a true reproduction of the object being sensed and considered as a basic mechanism which provokes an appropriate action or reaction. All these make us wonder if we are in a world of illusions or whether perception, by itself, is a big illusion.

One such paradoxical phenomenon discussed here is perceptual constancy. The phenomenon of constancy refers to our perceptual experiences wherein perception remains constant, in spite of the fact that stimulating conditions stipulate a change. Thus, the human being is perceived to be of the same height whether he is seen from a distance of two feet, five feet or fifteen feet.

The phenomenon of constancy is seen in relation to several attributes of the objects like shape and size. To a certain extent the phenomenon of constancy also results in errors of perception, though its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages.

If we accept that the infant does not have to learn entirely to distinguish between forms, shapes and sounds in his environment, but possesses a congenital capacity to do so, there is yet another problem which has aroused a lot of controversy. When we talk of visual perception in particular, how do infants – or even adults – actually make sense of visual objects? The obvious answer seems to be that objects in the external world appear as images on the retina and the individual then responds to these images as objects.

However, the answer is not quite so simple. The retina receives images which vary drastically depending on the particular lighting conditions, the viewing angle and the distance of the object at any given time. If one were to perceive objects merely on the basis of retinal images, one would see a different object at each angle and at each distance from which the same object was viewed. This obviously, does not happen.

When we see a plate at an angle its retinal image is an ellipse. If we see it head on then the retinal image is a complete circle. Yet, we know that both the greatly differing images are of the same object. When we see a chair from a foot away, the retinal image we receive is much larger than that received when the chair is two yards away from us. Yet we know that it is the same object. How do we come to know this?

The controversy that has surrounded the answer to this question has been again one of the opposition between the view that the child is born with the complete ability to see the world as the adult sees it, and the view that the child has to learn to see stable objects. For a long time the latter view held sway-namely, that the individual has to learn to compensate for the differences in angle, colour and distance presented by the same objects.

Recently, however, this view has been challenged and it has been shown that infants of six to eight weeks possess the ability to compensate for changes in the size and shape of retinal images. T.G.S. Bower’s experiments suggest that this ability is innate. Very young infants were conditioned to a cube of a certain size shown at a distance of one metre. Different-size cubes were then shown at a distance of three metres from the infant.

The conditioned response was always given, not to the larger cube which would have presented the same size of retinal image as did the correct cube at one metre, but to the correct cube despite its smaller retinal image size. Size constancy, however, does not occur in the absence of information or cues regarding the distance of the object. Holway and Boring showed that the judged size of cardboard disks became more and more inaccurate as more distance cues were eliminated.

Similar constancies occur regarding colour. A familiar object is always perceived as having the same colour even under different lighting conditions. For example, a piece of white paper is perceived as white whether seen under the yellowish glow of candle light, the stark whiteness of a tube light or under any other coloured lights.

Perceptual constancy, then, seems to be partly due to some innate mechanism and partly due to the influence of past experience and knowledge. The role of past experience in perception and the human being’s tendency to perceive on the basis of assumptions constructed from this past experience was clearly brought out by Ames.

In his famous ‘distorted room’ experiment Ames presented to his subjects an apparent perceptual contradiction between a specially constructed room (which looked normal from the subjects viewing angle when the room alone was seen) and known normal-sized objects seen in windows of the room.

Ames showed that whether the room or the object was suddenly seen as distorted, depended on the subject’s assumptions, i.e. whether the subject ‘assumed’ the room to be truly rectangular. He believed that our perceptions of the objects and people in our environment are subjective. In other words, they are based upon the assumptions we have built up about various objects and people. The organism, therefore, creates its phenomenal world.

Essay # 7. Perception of Movement :

Perception of movement is essential not only to human beings but also to animals. Movement is closely linked to the instinct of self-preservation because moving objects sometimes mean danger. However, the perception of movement involves both the visual messages from the eye as an image moves across the retina and the kinesthetic messages from the muscles around the eye as they shift the eye to follow a moving object.

But at times our perceptual processes play tricks on us and we think we perceive movement when the objects we are looking at are actually not moving at all. Thus, perceived movements can be divided into two types: real movement and illusory movement.

Real movement means the actual physical displacement of an object from one position to another. When we see a car being driven we perceive only the car in motion and the other things around it like trees, buildings etc. are stationary.

Illusory movement is that when an individual perceives objects as moving although they are stationary as is shown in Fig.7.12. One perceives this figure as moving black waves. Another example to illustrate this phenomena is an experience that you must have often felt while sitting in a stationary train; if another train moves by you feel that your own train is moving.

Another form of illusory movement is stroboscopic motion-the apparent motion created by a rapid movement of a series of images of stationary objects. A motion picture, for example, is not actually in motion at all. The film consists of a series of still pictures each one showing persons or objects in slightly different positions.

When these separate images are projected in a sequence on to the screen at a specified speed, the persons or objects seem to be moving because of the rapid change from one still picture to the next. The same illusion occurs when two lights are set apart at a suitable distance from each other and when they are switched on and off at an interval of one sixteenth of a second.

As a consequence the perceptual effect created is that of one light moving back and forth. This phenomenon of apparent motion is called the phi-phenomenon. Wertheiner’s experiments on phi- phenomenon formed the foundation for gestalt psychology.

Essay # 8. Development of Perception :

The infant’s perceptual world is different from the adult’s. Perception develops gradually as the individual grows and develops. It has also been shown that it is influenced to a great extent by the biological needs, maturation, learning, culture etc. Thus, qualitative and quantitative changes in perception take place in the course of an individual’s development.

The experiments of Gibson and Bowers show that depth and object perceptions are inborn, i.e. they are not dependent on learning, although they develop and shape at different rates. Goldstein emphasised the gradual development of perception from concrete to abstract.

However, Goldstein does not make a direct reference to perception but refers to it as the development of thinking or attitude. Witkin emphasises that perception which in the early years is field dependent gradually transforms itself into field independent.

Thus, stability and abstraction become possible as the individual develops. Von Senden presented a very interesting data regarding the patients who were born blind but have gained their vision as the result of operations. Their perceptual processes were studied carefully because their situation was considered analogous to a new-born infant’s who sees the world for the first time. Von Senden found that these patients did not experience normal perception immediately after they gained vision.

When an object was shown to them they could see something against a background but could not identify it, its shape and its distance from them. Colour discriminations were learned immediately. However learning to identify forms and objects in different contexts was a long and difficult process.

One patient learned to identify an egg, a potato and sugar in normal light on a table after many repetitions although he failed to recognise the same objects in colour light or when they were suspended by a thread with a change of background.

He could point correctly to the source of a sound but could not say from which direction it was coming. One can know from the above studies that perception does not develop overnight; perceptual capacity may be inborn but the ability develops gradually along with the development of other processes.

Essay # 9. Errors of Perception:

The perceptual processes enable an individual to perceive things around him accurately and facilitate his smooth functioning. However, some errors creep into this process, under certain circumstances, leading to wrong or impaired perceptions.

Two well-documented errors of perceptions are illusions and hallucinations:

1. Illusions :

A mistaken perception or distortion in perception is called an illusion. Generally perception involves the integration of sensory experiences and present psychological and organismic conditions. When the interpretation of a particular stimulus goes wrong, it gives rise to a wrong perception. For example, a rope in the dark is perceived as a snake; a dry leaf moving along the ground in the dark is perceived as a moving insect. Similarly, in the phi-phenomenon, although there is no physical movement of the lights, they are still perceived as moving.

Some illusions which occur commonly in the perception of geometrical figures are discussed in this article. These illusions are popularly known as ‘geometrical optical illusions’ a term coined by Oppel, a German scientist. He used this term to explain the over-estimation of an interrupted spatial extent compared to an uninterrupted one. Later, the term was used for any illusion seen in line drawings.

a. Mueller – Lyer Illusion:

In Figure 7.13 one line is bounded by ‘arrowheads’ and the other by ‘shaft heads’. Though these two lines are equal in length, invariably the line with closed heads is perceived as shorter than the line with open heads. Similarly, lines bounded by closed curves or brackets and circles are underestimated with respect to their length and vice versa.

b. Horizontal-Vertical Illusion:

In Fig.7.14 one line is horizontal and the other is vertical. Though both are equal in length, the vertical line is perceived as longer than the horizontal line. To test this you can make someone stand straight stretching both arms out to their full length.

Ask your friend whether the height of this person is the same as the length of his arms, i.e. the length from the right fingertips to the left fingertips. If your friend is not aware that these two lengths are equal, then he will invariably report that the height is greater than the length of the arms.

c. Poggendorff’s Illusion:

In Fig.7.15 a straight line appears to become slightly displaced as it passes through two parallel rectangles. Poggendorffs’ illusion is demonstrated in this figure.

d. Zollner’s Illusion:

In Fig.7.16 when two parallel lines are intersected by numerous short diagonal lines slanting in the opposite direction then the parallel lines are perceived as diverging, i, e. slanting backwards slightly instead of being straight.

The Mueller-Lyer Illusion, the Poggendorff’s Illusion and the Zollner’s Illusion are named after the scientists who discovered these phenomena. Illusions are not totally caused by subjective conditions. Sometimes the environment or the context within which a particular stimulus is perceived is responsible for illusions. For instance, the perception of a rope as a snake or a leaf as an insect, may have occurred due to darkness which is an environmental condition.

It has been suggested by scientists that geometrical illusions like the ones mentioned above are the natural outcome of a certain kind of nerve structure, functioning under a given set of physical conditions. The reader may raise the question as to why only visual illusions are elaborated in this article.

This is because so far scientists have been attracted by the problem of vision and consequently the maximum amount of research has been done in this particular area. However, researchers today are busy exploring and experimenting with illusions arising out of other sensory experiences like audition, gustation and so on.

2. Hallucinations :

Hallucinations are identified as one of the major errors of perception. While an illusion is considered as an inaccuracy, a distorted perception of existing stimuli, hallucinations are considered as false perceptions. Hallucinations are sensory perceptions in the absence of any corresponding external sensory stimuli.

For example, if a person claims that he has seen a ghost or a goddess when there is practically no stimulus either in the form of a human skeleton or a live human figure or at least anything resembling it, this will be conceived by scientific minds as a hallucination.

Strictly speaking, dreams are hallucinations since the persons and things perceived while one is asleep have no factual basis. But for all practical purposes the use of the term hallucination is restricted to imaginary perceptions experienced in the waking state. Thus, when a person hallucinates he hears, sees and feels non-existent objects or stimuli.

Like illusions, hallucinations sometimes depend on needs, mental states like fear, anxiety, culture, etc. Hallucinations are not necessarily indicative of abnormality. For example, normal individuals reared in certain cultures are encouraged to hallucinate as part of their religious experiences. They may claim to have seen or heard from their deity and this is considered a normal phenomenon.

Similarly, in our present society, it is not an uncommon sight, if a lover waiting anxiously says he heard the telephone ringing or a knock on the door and other such experiences in the absence of stimuli. These experiences which occur specially in moments of anxiety or fear or keen expectation are taken as natural and normal phenomena.

However, hallucinations verge on abnormality when they become chronic, intense and problematic to the perceiver and others around him and begin to hamper the normal and smooth functioning of his day-to-day activities.

Auditory Hallucination :

Mr. S, an agricultural worker, around 30 years of age, complained to his psychiatrist that voices bother him day and night. He can hear them cursing his mother and father Sometimes they command him to hit himself; sometimes they say obscene things. These voices are feminine and sometimes masculine; at times he hears his own voice commanding him.

Hallucinations are caused by psychological factors like conflict, guilt, fear, anxiety etc. They can also occur due to cerebral injuries, intake of alcohol, drugs like L.S.D. or heroin and the presence of certain toxic substances in the body.

Figural After – Effects :

The term figural after-effect is used to denote certain phenomena observed by Gibson in a series of interesting experiments. In one of his experiments subjects saw a distorted line passing through a prism. After 10 minutes, the apparent ‘curvature’ of the line was perceived as very much decreased.

The line tended to straighten out and when the prism was removed, the line was perceived as being curved in the opposite direction. In another experiment, by Kohler & Wallach, one figure (known as l or inspection figure) is observed for several minutes with total fixation.

Then this figure is replaced by a Test stimuls card T1 and the subjects are required to report its characteristics. It may be seen that objectively the two figures, the one inside T1 and T2 are identical in size, brightness and the distance from P. But both are smaller than the 1 square.

The square T1 falls in line with the contours of the inspection square and a little nearer its right hand contours. The phenomenal reports indicated that T1 was perceived as smaller and more distant from point P and further, its margins appeared paler. It is not necessary that all these characteristics should appear in the case of a given person at any time.

Kohler & Wallach offer an explanation for this, based on certain electrical field processes in the brain. According to them, there are some unspecified regions, of the central visual area through which current keeps on flowing. The currents flow according to the principle of least resistance.

When the 1 figure is presented, this flow is interrupted and the current flow is set up along the contours of this figure. The flow of the current however, increases the resistance in the tissues, thus forcing the current to flow into the neighbouring regions which in turn results in a gradient of resistance satiation about the contour of fig. Satiation present after the – removal of the 1 figure, lead to distortions in the T figures. There has been a lot of criticism against this view, particularly from the neurophysiological angle. It is also argued that the phenomenon of figural after-effect can be explained without having to take recourse to ‘electrical fields.’

Essay # 10. Studies on Perception:

Findings arrived at by studies of perception are not as dramatic as the findings of experiments in learning. Nevertheless their value has been recognised increasingly to serve mankind in many significant ways. An understanding of the subtleties and complexities of perception as a process gives an impression that human behaviour can be reduced to an interplay of the perceptions of self, the world, people, objects and events. As a matter of fact, various activities like science, art, religion etc., are nothing more than the outcome of human perceptions.

Turning to more concrete contributions, one of the major areas of investigation is in the field of colour perception. This brought out interesting findings as to why and how certain psychological factors determine colour perception. The impact of these findings can be seen on the walls of living rooms, bedrooms, showrooms, in the market for selling automobiles, textiles and even fruits and flowers.

Colour technologists involved in manufacturing dyes, textiles, and those who are involved in agencies of mass media like the cinema, television, magazines, photography and interior decorators invest large amounts of money to find out, create, and impress human perception, captivate their interests, moods and money through colours. They try to demonstrate how different and pleasant it is living and working with certain colours around you, rather than being in colourless, or lifeless surroundings.

Another area in which the findings of perception studies are being used is communication. Communication devices ranging from satellites to telephones are devised to facilitate the audio-visual perceptions of human beings. The utmost care has to be taken in designing transmission devices and equipping them to counter­balance phenomena like illusions, constancies etc. which arise in perception especially regarding sounds and figures.

They take care to make the communication of the speaker and the listener clear and intelligible, eliminate non-essential stimuli and aim at presenting synchronized and simultaneous transmission. Transport system such as airways, seaways and roadways have realised the importance of perception because the individuals who steer these vehicles make use of processes like sensation, attention and perception to the maximum extent.

If these processes fail or do not function adequately for one reason or the other, the consequence is human error or accident. Scientists working in the area of prevention of accidents, especially on highways, realised that accidents occur due to certain visual and auditory illusions.

Over-estimation or under-estimation of curves, distortion of cues due to excess of light, fog, or snow, and illusions of sound created by moving stimuli, all these sometimes can produce disasters. Thus, measures are being taken to provide information, instructions and clues which are specially devised and placed at convenient heights, angles and directions so that the driver can perceive from his fast-moving vehicle and avert disasters. The importance of such findings can be well understood by this illustration.

On December 4, 1965, a TWA Boeing 707 and an Eastern Airline Lockheed 1049 were enroute to John F. Kennedy International Airport and to Newark Airport, respectively. Both were converging on the New York area, the Boeing 707 at its assigned altitude of 11,000 feet and the Lockheed at its assigned altitude of 10,000 feet.

At the time, the area was overcast and the cloud tops protruded above a height of 10,000 feet. The clouds were generally higher in the north than in the south and seemed to form an upward, sloping bar of white against the blue background of the sky. Within a few moments of each other, the crew of both the aircraft perceived what appeared to be an imminent collision between the two planes.

They rapidly began evasive manoeuvres. The Lockheed aircraft pulled up and the Boeing rolled first to the right then to the left. The two aircrafts collided at approximately 11,000 feet. The structural damage to the Lockheed was sufficient to force it to land in an open field, where it was destroyed by impact and friction.

There were four fatalities and forty-nine non-fatal injuries. The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board attributed the collision to misjudgment of altitude separation by the crew of the Lockheed aircraft because of an ‘optical illusion’ created by the upward sloping contours of the cloud tops.

Four persons died and 49 were injured through the operation of the simple effect that we mimic on paper with simple lines and call the ‘Poggendorff illusion’. Perhaps, the idea that visual illusions are interesting but relatively unimportant oddities of perceptions itself is merely another illusion, which can prove costly.

Similar precautions are being taken in certain accident-prone heavy industries, like mining and manufacturing of volatile substances like explosives, chemicals and “so on where individuals have to attend to and comprehend several stimuli accurately within a short time.

Contributions to clinical psychology of the findings on hallucinations are immense. It has become one of the most important tools in diagnosing psychotic disorders. The seriousness of a psychosis is determined to a great extent by the degree, intensity and number of hallucinations experienced by the individual.

Researchers working on the problem of subliminal perception are trying to contribute their share of findings through work done on advertisements, unconscious processes etc. The advertising agencies are realising that they can capture their audience and customers by making their messages less obvious and more subtle. This is one way to induce curiosity and attract them to their products and thus, increase their sales.

The role of the unconscious in the area of subliminal perception is quite significant. Unconscious processes and their allied phenomena, for all practical purposes, can be considered synonymous with subliminal perceptions, because they operate from a level of consciousness which is less than normal.

One may wonder whether findings on ESP have any value to the present computer world which is capable of anything right from brushing one’s teeth to singing a lullaby. But ESP seems to offer so much that the world is beginning to develop an impression that parapsychology is no more a mere intellectual adventure. If individuals could be taught and made to develop this capacity we could go to the moon and other planets, eat and live comfortably and chat with friends across the seas and continents for hours together.

Imagine, all this could be done without spending a paisa and then money would lose its importance. However, to achieve this stage, sciences have to travel a long and difficult way like Christian in ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’. Today, such fantastic activities may appear to be distant probabilities but we may soon see them as distinct possibilities.

The one area where research findings on perception and the perceptual processes have been found extremely useful is in advertising. Very innovative advertisements are designed today based on their knowledge of the perceptual processes.

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Sensation and Perception: World of Human Sensory Experience

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Published: Sep 12, 2023

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Understanding sensation, perception: making sense of sensation, the role of attention, perceptual illusions: when perception deceives, the influence of experience and culture, conclusion: the complex interplay of sensation and perception.

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• The Cognitive Basis of Visual Object Perception

The Cognitive Basis of Visual Object Perception - Essay Example

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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Title: run-time monitoring of 3d object detection in automated driving systems using early layer neural activation patterns.

Abstract: Monitoring the integrity of object detection for errors within the perception module of automated driving systems (ADS) is paramount for ensuring safety. Despite recent advancements in deep neural network (DNN)-based object detectors, their susceptibility to detection errors, particularly in the less-explored realm of 3D object detection, remains a significant concern. State-of-the-art integrity monitoring (also known as introspection) mechanisms in 2D object detection mainly utilise the activation patterns in the final layer of the DNN-based detector's backbone. However, that may not sufficiently address the complexities and sparsity of data in 3D object detection. To this end, we conduct, in this article, an extensive investigation into the effects of activation patterns extracted from various layers of the backbone network for introspecting the operation of 3D object detectors. Through a comparative analysis using Kitti and NuScenes datasets with PointPillars and CenterPoint detectors, we demonstrate that using earlier layers' activation patterns enhances the error detection performance of the integrity monitoring system, yet increases computational complexity. To address the real-time operation requirements in ADS, we also introduce a novel introspection method that combines activation patterns from multiple layers of the detector's backbone and report its performance.

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Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology

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How do we see? This question has fascinated and perplexed philosophers and scientists for millennia. In visual perception, mind and world meet, when light reflected from objects enters the eyes and stimulates the nerves leading to activity in the brain near the back of the head. This neural activity yields conscious experiences of a world in three dimensions, clothed in colors, and immediately recognized as (say) ground, sky, grass, trees, and friends. The visual brain also produces nonconscious representations that interact with other brain systems for perception and cognition and that help to regulate our visually guided actions. But how does all of this really work? The answers concern the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of visual perception and cognition. Gary Hatfield’s essays address fundamental questions concerning, in Part I, the psychological processes underlying spatial perception and perception of objects; in Part II, psychological theories and metaphysical controversies about color perception and qualia; and, in Part III, the history and philosophy of theories of vision, including methodological controversies surrounding introspection and involving the relations between psychology and the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science. An introductory chapter provides a unified overview; an extensive reference list rounds out the volume.

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