Perceptual psychology

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Perceptual psychology is a subfield of cognitive psychology [1] that concerns the conscious and unconscious innate aspects of the human cognitive system: perception. [2]

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A pioneer of the field was James J. Gibson. One major study was that of affordances, i.e. the perceived utility of objects in, or features of, one's surroundings. According to Gibson, such features or objects were perceived as affordances and not as separate or distinct objects in themselves. This view was central to several other fields as software user interface and usability engineering, environmentalism in psychology, and ultimately to political economy where the perceptual view was used to explain the omission of key inputs or consequences of economic transactions, i.e. resources and wastes.

Gerard Egan and Robert Bolton explored areas of interpersonal interactions based on the premise that people act in accordance with their perception of a given situation. While behaviour is obvious, a person's thoughts and feelings are masked. This gives rise to the idea that the most common problems between people are based on the assumption that we can guess what the other person is feeling and thinking. They also offered methods, within this scope, for effective communications. This includes reflective listening, assertion skills, conflict resolution etc. Perceptual psychology is often used in therapy to help a patient better their problem-solving skills. [3]

Nativism vs. empiricism

Nativist and empiricist approaches to perceptual psychology have been researched and debated to find out which is the basis in the development of perception. Nativists believe humans are born with all the perceptual abilities needed. Nativism is the favoured theory on perception. Empiricists believe that humans are not born with perceptual abilities, but instead must learn them. [4]

See also


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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perception</span> Interpretation of sensory information

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gestalt psychology</span> Theory of perception

Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.

Categorization is the ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between the elements of the experience of the world, organizing and classifying experience by associating them to a more abstract group, on the basis of their traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and as such it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affordance</span> Possibility of an action on an object or environment

In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning, it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sensorium</span>

A sensorium (/sɛnˈsɔːrɪəm/) is the apparatus of an organism's perception considered as a whole, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences, perceives and interprets the environments within which it lives. The term originally entered English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century, from the stem sens- ("sense"). In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind's organ. In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world around us by using faculties of the mind such as senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition, and intelligence.

Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

Ecological psychology is the scientific study of perception-action from a direct realist approach. Ecological psychology is a school of psychology that follows much of the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson. Those in the field of Ecological Psychology reject the mainstream explanations of perception laid out by cognitive psychology. The ecological psychology can be broken into a few sub categories: perception, action, and dynamical systems. As a clarification, many in this field would reject the separation of perception and action, stating that perception and action are inseparable. These perceptions are shaped by an individual's ability to engage with their emotional experiences in relation to the environment and reflect on and process these. This capacity for emotional engagement leads to action, collective processing, social capital, and pro environmental behaviour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Treisman</span> English cognitive psychologist (1935–2018)

Anne Marie Treisman was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology.

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.

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute, one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain, especially the human brain.

Haptic perception means literally the ability "to grasp something". Perception in this case is achieved through the active exploration of surfaces and objects by a moving subject, as opposed to passive contact by a static subject during tactile perception.

Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual perception</span> Ability to interpret the surrounding environment using light in the visible spectrum

Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision, color vision, scotopic vision, and mesopic vision, using light in the visible spectrum reflected by objects in the environment. This is different from visual acuity, which refers to how clearly a person sees. A person can have problems with visual perceptual processing even if they have 20/20 vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perceptual learning</span>

Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embodied cognition</span> Interdisciplinary theory

Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. The cognitive features include high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.

The ambient optic array is the structured arrangement of light with respect to a point of observation. American psychologist James J. Gibson posited the existence of the ambient optic array as a central part of his ecological approach to optics. For Gibson, perception is a bottom-up process, whereby the agent accesses information about the environment directly from invariant structures in the ambient optic array, rather than recovering it by means of complex cognitive processes. More controversially, Gibson claimed that agents can also directly pick-up the various affordances of the environment, or opportunities for the observer to act in the environment, from the ambient optic array.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spatial ability</span> Capacity to understand 3D relationships

Spatial ability or visuo-spatial ability is the capacity to understand, reason, and remember the visual and spatial relations among objects or space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald D. Hoffman</span> American cognitive psychologist and popular science author

Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

References

  1. Richards, Anne Cohen; Richards, Fred (April 1976). "Goals of educational psychology in teacher education: A humanistic perspective". Contemporary Educational Psychology. 1 (2): 124–131. doi:10.1016/0361-476x(76)90016-3. ISSN   0361-476X.
  2. Marcel, Anthony J. (April 1983). "Conscious and unconscious perception: An approach to the relations between phenomenal experience and perceptual processes". Cognitive Psychology. 15 (2): 238–300. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(83)90010-5. ISSN   0010-0285. PMID   6617136. S2CID   45224399.
  3. Wells-Moran, Jolyn. "Cognitive Psychology". lifetips. Retrieved 2011-07-01.
  4. "Perceptual Psychology: Nativism Vs. Empiricism". Archived from the original on 16 February 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2011.