1

Module: II- Perception

Nature and Determinants; Perceptual Organization; Form, Space and Depth Perception

Nature and Determinants of Perception

The ability to detect and interpret the events that are occurring around us allows us to respond to
these stimuli appropriately (Gibson & Pick, 2000). This section focuses on perception—the
organization and interpretation of sensations. Sensation (awareness resulting from the
stimulation of a sense organ) and perception work seamlessly together to allow us to experience
the world through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin, but also to combine what we are
currently learning from the environment with what we already know about it to make judgments
and to choose appropriate behaviors.

Psychologists who study sensation do so primarily from a biological perspective.

As you will see, they have found that all our sense organs are, in some very basic
ways, much alike. All the sense organs transform physical stimulation (such as light
waves or sound waves) into the neural impulses that give us sensations (such as the
experience of light or sound).

Perception, on the other hand, brings meaning to sensation, so perception produces an

interpretation of the world, not a perfect representation of it.

In brief, we might say that the task of perception is to organize sensation into stable,
meaningful percepts. A percept, then, is not just a sensation but the associated meaning as well.

Perceptual Processing: Finding Meaning in Sensation

How does the sensory image of a person become the percept of someone you recognize? That is,
how does mere sensation become an elaborate and meaningful perception? Let’s begin with two
visual pathways that help us identify objects and locate them in space: the what pathway and the
where pathway.

The What and Where Pathways in the Brain

The primary visual cortex, at the back of the brain, is the what pathway allows us to determine
what objects are. The other stream, the where pathway, projects to the parietal lobe, which
determines an object’s location.

Feature Detectors: The deeper information travels into the brain along the what and where
pathways, the more specialized processing becomes. Ultimately, specialized groups of cells in
the visual pathways extract very specific stimulus features, such as an object’s length, slant,
 2

colour, boundary, location, and movement (Kandel & Squire, 2000). Perceptual psychologists
call these cells feature detectors.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing:

Forming a percept also seems to involve imposing a pattern on sensation. This involves two
complementary processes that psychologists call top-down processing and bottom-up processing.
In top-down processing, our goals, past experience, knowledge, expectations, memory,
motivations, or cultural background guide our perceptions of objects—or events (see Nelson,
1993). Trying to find your car keys in a cluttered room requires
top-down processing. If you skip lunch to go grocery shopping, top-down hunger signals will
probably make you notice all the snack foods in the store.

In bottom-up processing, the characteristics of the stimulus (rather than a concept

in our minds) exert a strong influence on our perceptions. Bottom-up processing relies
heavily on the brain’s feature detectors to sense these stimulus characteristics: Is it
moving? What colour is it? Is it loud, sweet, painful, pleasant smelling, wet, hot…? You
are doing bottom-up processing when you notice a moving fish in an aquarium, a hot
pepper in a stir-fry, or a loud noise in the middle of the night.
Thus, bottom-up processing involves sending sensory data into the system through
receptors and sending it “upward” to the cortex, where a basic analysis, involving the
feature detectors, is first performed to determine the characteristics of the stimulus.
Psychologists also refer to this as stimulus-driven processing because the resulting percept is
determined, or “driven,” by stimulus features. By contrast, top-down processing
follows in the opposite direction, with the percept being driven by some concept in the
cortex—at the “top” of the brain. Because this sort of thinking relies heavily on concepts in the
perceiver’s own mind, it is also known as conceptually driven processing.

Perceptual Constancies

We can illustrate another aspect of perception with yet another example of top-down processing.
Suppose that you are looking at a door, such as the one pictured below. You “know” that the
door is rectangular, even though your sensory image of it is distorted when you are not looking at
it straight-on. Your brain automatically corrects the sensory distortion so that you perceive the
door as being rectangular.

This ability to see an object as being the same shape from different angles or distances is just one
example of a perceptual constancy. In fact, there are many kinds of
perceptual constancies. These include colour constancy, which allows us to see a f ower
as being the same colour in the reddish light of sunset as in the white glare of midday.
Size constancy allows us to perceive a person as the same size at different distances
 3

and also serves as a strong cue for depth perception. And it was shape constancy that
allowed us to see the door as remaining rectangular from different angles. Together,
these constancies help us identify and track objects in a changing world.

Perceiving Form

One of the important processes required in vision is the perception of form. German
psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s, including Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka
(1886–1941), and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967), argued that we create forms out of their
component sensations based on the idea of the gestalt, a meaningfully organized whole. The idea
of the gestalt is that the “whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Gestalt Principles of Form Perception

Principle Example Example

Figure and Ground
We structure input such that
we always see a figure (image)
against a ground
At right, you may see a vase or
you may see two faces,
but in either case, you will
organize the image as a figure
against a ground.

Similarity You are more likely to see three

Stimuli that are similar to each similar columns among the XYX
other tend to be grouped characters at right than you are to
together. see four rows

Proximity Do you see four or eight

We tend to group nearby figures images at right? Principles of
together proximity suggest that you might
see only four.
 4

Continuity At right, most people see a line

We tend to perceive stimuli of dots that moves from the
in smooth, continuous ways lower left to the upper right,
rather than more discontinuous rather than a line that
ways. moves from the left and then
suddenly turns down. The
principle of continuity leads us to
see most lines as following the
smoothest possible path.
Closure
We tend to fill in gaps in an Closure leads us to see a single
incomplete image to create a spherical object at right rather
complete, whole object than a set of unrelated cones

Perceiving Depth

Depth perception is the ability to perceive three-dimensional space and to accurately judge
distance. Without depth perception, we would be unable to drive a car, thread a needle, or simply
navigate our way around the supermarket (Howard & Rogers, 2001). Research has found that
depth perception is in part based on innate capacities and in part learned through experience
(Witherington, 2005). Psychologists Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (1960) tested the ability
to perceive depth in 6- to 14-month-old infants by placing them on a visual cliff, a mechanism
that gives the perception of a dangerous drop-off, in which infants can be safely tested for their
perception of depth .The infants were placed on one side of the “cliff,‖ while their mothers called
to them from the other side. Gibson and Walk found that most infants either crawled away from
the cliff or remained on the board and cried because they wanted to go to their mothers, but the
infants perceived a chasm that they instinctively could not cross.

Depth perception is the result of our use of depth cues, messages from our bodies and the
external environment that supply us with information about space and distance.
Binocular depth cues are depth cues that are created by retinal image disparity—that is, the
space between our eyes, and thus which require the coordination of both eyes. One outcome of
retinal disparity is that the images projected on each eye are slightly different from each other.
The visual cortex automatically merges the two images into one, enabling us to perceive depth.
Three-dimensional movies make use of retinal disparity by using 3-D glasses that the viewer
wears to create a different image on each eye. The perceptual system quickly, easily, and
unconsciously turns the disparity into 3-D. An important binocular depth cue is convergence, the
inward turning of our eyes that is required to focus on objects that are less than about 50 feet
away from us. The visual cortex uses the size of the convergence angle between the eyes to judge
 5

the object’s distance. You will be able to feel your eyes converging if you slowly bring a finger
closer to your nose while continuing to focus on it. When you close one eye, you no longer feel
the tension—convergence is a binocular depth cue that requires both eyes to work. The visual
system also uses accommodation to help determine depth. As the lens changes its curvature to
focus on distant or close objects, information relayed from the muscles attached to the lens helps
us determine an object’s distance. Accommodation is only effective at short viewing distances,
however, so while it comes in handy when threading a needle or tying shoelaces, it is far less
effective when driving or playing sports.

Although the best cues to depth occur when both eyes work together, we are able to see depth
even with one eye closed. Monocular depth cues are depth cues that help us perceive depth using
only one eye (Sekuler & Blake, 2006).

"Monocular Depth Cues That Help Us Judge Depth at a Distance"

Name & Description Example Example

Position The fence posts at right appear

We tend to see objects farther away not only because
higher up in our field of vision as they become smaller but also
farther away. because they appear
higher up in the picture

Relative size:
Assuming that the objects in a
scene are the same size, smaller
objects are perceived as farther
away.
At right, the cars in the distance
appear smaller than those nearer
to us.

Linear perspective We know that the tracks at right

Parallel lines appear to are parallel. When they appear
converge at a distance. closer together, we determine
they are farther away

Light and shadow

The eye receives more reflected
light from objects that are closer
to us. Normally, light comes
from above, so darker images are
in shadow.
We see the images at right as
extending and indented according
to their
shadowing. If we invert the
picture, the images will reverse.
 6

Interposition At right, because the blue star

When one object overlaps covers the pink bar, it is seen as
another object, we view it as closer than the yellow moon.
closer.

Aerial perspective The artist who painted the picture

Objects that appear hazy, or that on the right used aerial
are covered with smog or dust, perspective to make the clouds
appear farther away. more hazy and thus appear
farther away.

b. Binocular cues:
Sometimes the depth can be perceived when both eyes are used. This is called binocular cue.
There are 2 binocular cues:

1. Retinal disparity:
The image of the object which falls on both the retinas differs. Disparity will be more when the
object is closer than when it is far away. Depending upon the correspondence between the
distance and the amount of disparity, the depth can be perceived.

2. Convergence or divergence of eyeballs:

When the object moves nearer and nearer to our eyes, our eyeballs converge, and as the object
moves away from us the eyeballs diverge. This process acts as a binocular cue to perceive the
depth.

Perception of Movement:
When a particular object appears in different places at different times we understand that the
object is in movement. This process is called perception of movement. Such an ability to
perceive movement is gained from birth itself as a natural process.
 7

This is a most important ability. It is only by this ability the organism can understand the world
around and can perceive the dangers / threats in the movement, so that it can easily escape from
such dangers.

Apparent motion:
Sometimes we perceive that the objects are moving. In fact the objects are stationary, i.e. they
will not be moving. Hence the perception of an object which is not moving, as an object moving
is an illusion. For example, when we are moving fast in a bus, the trees, plants and other non-
moving objects appear to move in the opposite direction.

In the same way, even the movements of figures in a film appear to move, though they remain
without movement. Since moving pictures are taken continuously and the film reel is run very
fast, it produces a movement feeling called stroboscopic motion or phi phenomenon.

Factors Affecting Perception:

There are individual differences in perceptual abilities. Two people may perceive the same
stimulus differently.

The factors affecting the perceptions of people are:

a. Perceptual learning:
Based on past experiences or any special training that we get, every one of us learns to
emphasise some sensory inputs and to ignore others. For example, a person who has got training
in some occupation like artistry or other skilled jobs can perform better than other untrained
people. Experience is the best teacher for such perceptual skills.

For example, blind people identify the people by their voice or by sounds of their footsteps.

b. Mental set:
Set refers to preparedness or readiness to receive some sensory input. Such expectancy keeps the
individual prepared with good attention and concentration. For example, when we are expecting
the arrival of a train, we listen to its horn or sound even if there is a lot of noise disturbance.
 8

c. Motives and needs:

Our motives and needs will definitely influence our perception. For example, a hungry person is
motivated to recognise only the food items among other articles. His attention cannot be directed
towards other things until his motive is satisfied.

d. Cognitive styles:
People are said to differ in the ways they characteristically process the information. Every
individual will have his or her own way of understanding the situation. It is said that the people
who are flexible will have good attention and they are less affected by interfering influences and
to be less dominated by internal needs and motives than or people at the constricted end.