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How Do We Perceive Messages?

Keana Barrow

Ottawa University

04/05/2020
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How Do We Perceive Messages?

Communication and how us humans perceive messages could be very complex. In my

opinion, this is why we need to be better at communicating the truth and our true feelings.

Practicing communication skills and practicing the different ways in which one can communicate

is so important, especially when we go into the real world in our work and professional

environments.

Different Ways, Different Thinking

Visual communication, especially, could be a little harder to understand and perceive. I

say this because people view things and see things a lot differently than the person next to them.

Visual communication is the process of sending and receiving messages between humans with

our eyes and mental images as the primary delivery of meaning. Visual communication reminds

me a lot about photographers and artists. I think these hobbies and professions prove that a lot of

people see the world differently and have different meanings to what they see. Even though,

scientifically, everyone receives messages the same and it goes through the same process, it

doesn’t always mean we understand the message the same.

Scientifically and technically, how we perceive messages has to do with our eyes and brains.

There are plenty of different theories on how one perceives messages. One example is Gregory’s

Visual Assumption Theory. His theory relies on top-down processing with is also known as

conceptual- driven processing. This means we look at the bigger picture and make our best guess

of what we see based on expectations, beliefs, prior knowledge, and past experiences. So, we

make up our own assumptions on an image, and Gregory says that we are typically correct in

those assumptions. “Based on Gregory’s theories, we can say that: Nearly 90% of what we see is

lost by the time it reaches our brains. Because of this, the brain has to make its best guess based
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on our past experiences or prior knowledge, the visual information we see is combined with

previously stored information about the world, which we have built up as a result of experience,

and our surroundings help to provide context to the visual information we absorb.” (Fanguy,

2016).

Secondly, there is Sanocki and Sulman’s Color Relations Experiment. Thomas Sanocki

and Noah Sulman conducted an experiment to learn about the impact of color on the visual short-

term memory. In the experiment, they gave people four different types of color patterns and they

were told to rate them harmonious or disharmonious. Based on this study, Sanocki and Sulman

discovered these results: “People remember color patterns better when the color palette is

harmonious, people remember patterns with fewer colors (2-color palettes) better than patterns

with more colors (4-color palettes), and the contrast of surrounding colors impacted how well we

remember the color pattern. In other words, color differences between the content and the

background may enhance our ability to focus our attention on the content itself.” (Fanguy, 2016).

The third theory is the binocular rivalry phenomenon. So, binocular rivalry happens when

our eyes see two different images in the same location. There is one image that dominates and

another that is faded or suppressed. “The dominance alternates periodically, so rather than seeing

a single combination of both visuals at all times, we experience the alternation of the images

over time as the two visuals compete for visual dominance.” There was also an experiment for

this theory and the outcomes for this was: “The fMRI for all observers indicated strong binocular

rivalry when dissimilar visuals were presented and binocular rivalry happens during the visual

processing stage. In other words, during the short period of time when our eyes rest upon two

dissimilar images that are close together, we will not be able to determine what we actually see.”

(Fanguy, 2016).
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Conclusion

These are great examples of the different ways that scholars think we perceive messages.

Although they all had different ideas and backed their hypotheses up with experiments and

results, how we receive and deliver messages can be very familiar. These experiments were

fairly new, so this is something that is still being studied and looked at for more information.
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References

5 Psychology Studies Show How People Perceive Visual Information. (2019, November

10). Retrieved from https://piktochart.com/blog/5-psychology-studies-that-tell-us-how-people-

perceive-visual-information/

Vitone, P. (2011, December 8). Visual Communication. Retrieved from

https://howweperceive.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/the-communication-through-image-design-

and-typography/

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