Constructive perception

Last updated January 14, 2024

Constructive perception is the theory of perception in which the perceiver uses sensory information and other sources of information to construct a cognitive understanding of a stimulus. In contrast to this top-down approach, there is the bottom-up approach of direct perception. Perception is more of a hypothesis, and the evidence to support this is that "Perception allows behaviour to be generally appropriate to non-sensed object characteristics," meaning that we react to obvious things that, for example, are like doors even though we only see a "long, narrow rectangle as the door is ajar."^[1]

Also known as intelligent perception, constructive perception shows the relationship between intelligence and perception. This comes from the importance of high-order thinking and learning in perception. During perception, hypotheses are formed and tested about percepts that are based on three things: sensory data, knowledge, and high-level cognitive processes. Visual sensations are usually correctly attributed because we unconsciously assimilate information from many sources and then unconsciously make judgments based on this information. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant explains that our perception of the world is reciprocal; it both is affected by and affects our experience of the world.

Evidence of constructive perception

Context effects are not explained by bottom-up theories of accounting. Irving Biederman performed experiments that demonstrated dramatic context effects. For example, Stephen Palmer carried out an experiment in which the participants were asked to identify objects after they were shown either a relevant or irrelevant context. They might be shown a scene of a baseball game, followed by images of a baseball, car, and a phone. The stimuli that was most relevant to the context, the baseball, was recognized quicker than those that were irrelevant, car and phone.

Perceptual constancy gives evidence that high-level constructive processes occur during perception. As lighting conditions change, the color of objects, such as bananas or cherries, appear to remain constant. Even when there is not enough light to even stimulate cone cells and give the sensation of color, bananas and cherries are still perceived as yellow and red, respectively.

Configural-superiority effect is another compelling context effect. This effect is demonstrated by the decrease in response time by participants when identifying objects in complex configurations over objects in isolation. For example, four diagonal lines are shown and participants are asked the location of the odd line indicated by its different orientation. In another condition, an L-shaped fixed context is added; this creates three triangles and another object made of three lines. Participants were able to discern the odd three line object from the set of triangles quicker than the single diagonal lines alone.

Examples

You are traveling down a road you have never been on before, up ahead you see an octagonal red sign with white letters near an intersection. The sign has a vine growing on it, and all you can read is "ST_P." These letters alone are meaningless, however taken in its context and using knowledge from past experiences you infer that it is a stop sign. This is example of constructive perception because it required intelligence and thought to combine sensory information, a red octagonal sign with "ST_P" in white letters at an intersection, and knowledge from past experiences, stop signs are red octagonal signs with "STOP" in white letters placed at an intersection, to perceive it as a stop sign.

Theories

A theory on how perception can be constructed in the nervous system is based on the cybernetic mechanisms of anapoiesis, which means re-creation. As a physiological mechanism, reconstructive perception has been proposed to be a function of metabotropic receptors and G protein-gated ion channels, which are hypothesised to temporality rewire neural networks.^[2]

Related Research Articles

Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.

An illusion is a distortion of the senses, which can reveal how the mind normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. Although illusions distort the human perception of reality, they are generally shared by most people.

In visual perception, an optical illusion is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect. An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.

Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.

Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.

Stimulus modality, also called sensory modality, is one aspect of a stimulus or what is perceived after a stimulus. For example, the temperature modality is registered after heat or cold stimulate a receptor. Some sensory modalities include: light, sound, temperature, taste, pressure, and smell. The type and location of the sensory receptor activated by the stimulus plays the primary role in coding the sensation. All sensory modalities work together to heighten stimuli sensation when necessary.

In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.

Inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits. When it becomes impossible to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary "blindness" effect can occur, as individuals fail to see unexpected but often salient objects or stimuli.

Feature integration theory is a theory of attention developed in 1980 by Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade that suggests that when perceiving a stimulus, features are "registered early, automatically, and in parallel, while objects are identified separately" and at a later stage in processing. The theory has been one of the most influential psychological models of human visual attention.

Memory has the ability to encode, store and recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows a perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from long-term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation, which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual.

A sensory cue is a statistic or signal that can be extracted from the sensory input by a perceiver, that indicates the state of some property of the world that the perceiver is interested in perceiving.

Embodied cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of research, the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies: the modeling of psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the mind and body as a single entity; the formation of a common set of general principles of intelligent behavior; and the experimental use of robotic agents in controlled environments.

In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, pattern recognition describes a cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory.

Body schema is an organism's internal model of its own body, including the position of its limbs. The neurologist Sir Henry Head originally defined it as a postural model of the body that actively organizes and modifies 'the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensation of body position, or of locality, rises into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has happened before'. As a postural model that keeps track of limb position, it plays an important role in control of action.

Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level, information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed, or their abstractions. Any natural process that is not completely random and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information. Whereas digital signals and other data use discrete signs to convey information, other phenomena and artifacts such as analogue signals, poems, pictures, music or other sounds, and currents convey information in a more continuous form. Information is not knowledge itself, but the meaning that may be derived from a representation through interpretation.

A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of stimuli. Although in some cultures five human senses were traditionally identified as such, many more are now recognized. Senses used by non-human organisms are even greater in variety and number. During sensation, sense organs collect various stimuli for transduction, meaning transformation into a form that can be understood by the brain. Sensation and perception are fundamental to nearly every aspect of an organism's cognition, behavior and thought.

Chronostasis is a type of temporal illusion in which the first impression following the introduction of a new event or task-demand to the brain can appear to be extended in time. For example, chronostasis temporarily occurs when fixating on a target stimulus, immediately following a saccade. This elicits an overestimation in the temporal duration for which that target stimulus was perceived. This effect can extend apparent durations by up to half a second and is consistent with the idea that the visual system models events prior to perception.

Attenuation theory, also known as Treisman’s Attenuation Model, is a model of selective attention proposed by Anne Treisman, and can be seen as a revision of Donald Broadbent's filter model. Treisman proposed attenuation theory as a means to explain how unattended stimuli sometimes came to be processed in a more rigorous manner than what Broadbent's filter model could account for. As a result, attenuation theory added layers of sophistication to Broadbent's original idea of how selective attention might operate: claiming that instead of a filter which barred unattended inputs from ever entering awareness, it was a process of attenuation. Thus, the attenuation of unattended stimuli would make it difficult, but not impossible to extract meaningful content from irrelevant inputs, so long as stimuli still possessed sufficient "strength" after attenuation to make it through a hierarchical analysis process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ideasthesia</span> Phenomenon in which concepts evoke sensory experiences

Ideasthesia is a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek ἰδέα and αἴσθησις, meaning 'sensing concepts' or 'sensing ideas'. The notion was introduced by neuroscientist Danko Nikolić as an alternative explanation for a set of phenomena traditionally covered by synesthesia.

A context effect is an aspect of cognitive psychology that describes the influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus. The impact of context effects is considered to be part of top-down design. The concept is supported by the theoretical approach to perception known as constructive perception. Context effects can impact our daily lives in many ways such as word recognition, learning abilities, memory, and object recognition. It can have an extensive effect on marketing and consumer decisions. For example, research has shown that the comfort level of the floor that shoppers are standing on while reviewing products can affect their assessments of product's quality, leading to higher assessments if the floor is comfortable and lower ratings if it is uncomfortable. Because of effects such as this, context effects are currently studied predominantly in marketing.

References

↑ "Gregory's Top-Down Theory of Perception". frederikkechristiansenpsychology. 2012-09-06. Retrieved 2019-02-20.
↑ Nikolić, D. (2022). Where is the mind within the brain? Transient selection of subnetworks by metabotropic receptors and G protein-gated ion channels. arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.11249.

Sternberg, Robert J. (2006). Cognitive Psychology, 4th ed. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth. pp. 143–145. ISBN 0-534-51421-9.

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[1] "Gregory's Top-Down Theory of Perception". frederikkechristiansenpsychology. 2012-09-06. Retrieved 2019-02-20.

[2] Nikolić, D. (2022). Where is the mind within the brain? Transient selection of subnetworks by metabotropic receptors and G protein-gated ion channels. arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.11249.

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