In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining

awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin
words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession,
apprehension with the mind or senses."[1]

Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative law in psychology is
the Weber-Fechner law, which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of physical
stimuli and their perceptual effects. The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt school of
psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approach.

Type

What one perceives is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture,
and the interpretation of the perceived.

Two types of consciousness are considerable regarding perception: phenomenal (any occurrence
that is observable and physical) and psychological. The difference every sighted person can
demonstrate to him- or herself is by the simple opening and closing of his or her eyes:
phenomenal consciousness is thought, on average, to be predominately absent without senses
such as sight. Through the full or rich sensations present in senses such as sight, nothing by
comparison is present while the senses are not engaged, such as when the eyes are closed. Using
this precept, it is understood that, in the vast majority of cases, logical solutions are reached
through simple human sensation.[2] The analogy of Plato's Cave was coined to express these
ideas.[clarification needed]

Passive perception (conceived by René Descartes) can be surmised as the following sequence of
events: surrounding → input (senses) → processing (brain) → output (re-action).[3] Although still
supported by mainstream philosophers, psychologists and neurologists, this theory is nowadays
losing momentum. The theory of active perception has emerged from extensive research of
sensory illusions, most notably the works of Richard L. Gregory. This theory, which is
increasingly gaining experimental support, can be surmised as dynamic relationship between
"description" (in the brain) ↔ senses ↔ surrounding, all of which holds true to the linear
concept of experience.

Perception and reality

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's
eye.[4] Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as
their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous
image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The question, "Is the glass half empty
or half full?" serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.
Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any
percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally
not perceive it.

The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with
a preconceived concept about it, they tend to take those concepts and see them whether or not
they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new
information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. A person’s knowledge
creates his or her reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that
to which it has been exposed. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try
to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That
which most closely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up what we see
when we look at things that we don’t comprehend.[5]

This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage,

and also in biological mimicry, for example by European Peacock butterflies, whose wings bear
eye markings that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator.
Perceptual ambiguity is not restricted to vision. For example, recent touch perception research
Robles-De-La-Torre & Hayward 2001 found that kinesthesia based haptic perception strongly
relies on the forces experienced during touch.[6]

Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This (with reference to
perception) is the claim that sensations are, by themselves, unable to provide a unique
description of the world. Sensations require 'enriching', which is the role of the mental model. A
different type of theory is the perceptual ecology approach of James J. Gibson. Gibson rejected
the assumption of a poverty of stimulus by rejecting the notion that perception is based in
sensations. Instead, he investigated what information is actually presented to the perceptual
systems. He and the psychologists who work within this paradigm detailed how the world could
be specified to a mobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of information about the
world into energy arrays. Specification is a 1:1 mapping of some aspect of the world into a
perceptual array; given such a mapping, no enrichment is required and perception is direct
perception.

Preconceptions can influence how the world is perceived. For example, one classic psychological
experiment showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing
cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts).[7]

There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay", to allow nerve
impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals.[8]

[edit] Perception-in-action
In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's
eye.[4] Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as
their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous
image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The question, "Is the glass half empty
or half full?" serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.

Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any
percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally
not perceive it.

The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with
a preconceived concept about it, they tend to take those concepts and see them whether or not
they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new
information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. A person’s knowledge
creates his or her reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that
to which it has been exposed. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try
to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That
which most closely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up what we see
when we look at things that we don’t comprehend.[5]

This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage,

and also in biological mimicry, for example by European Peacock butterflies, whose wings bear
eye markings that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator.
Perceptual ambiguity is not restricted to vision. For example, recent touch perception research
Robles-De-La-Torre & Hayward 2001 found that kinesthesia based haptic perception strongly
relies on the forces experienced during touch.[6]

Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This (with reference to
perception) is the claim that sensations are, by themselves, unable to provide a unique
description of the world. Sensations require 'enriching', which is the role of the mental model. A
different type of theory is the perceptual ecology approach of James J. Gibson. Gibson rejected
the assumption of a poverty of stimulus by rejecting the notion that perception is based in
sensations. Instead, he investigated what information is actually presented to the perceptual
systems. He and the psychologists who work within this paradigm detailed how the world could
be specified to a mobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of information about the
world into energy arrays. Specification is a 1:1 mapping of some aspect of the world into a
perceptual array; given such a mapping, no enrichment is required and perception is direct
perception.

Preconceptions can influence how the world is perceived. For example, one classic psychological
experiment showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing
cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts).[7]

There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay", to allow nerve
impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals.[8]

[edit] Perception-in-action
An ecological understanding of perception derived from Gibson's early work is that of
"perception-in-action", the notion that perception is a requisite property of animate action; that
without perception action would be unguided, and without action perception would serve no
purpose. Animate actions require both perception and motion, and perception and movement can
be described as "two sides of the same coin, the coin is action". Gibson works from the
assumption that singular entities, which he calls "invariants", already exist in the real world and
that all that the perception process does is to home in upon them. A view known as
constructivism (held by such philosophers as Ernst von Glasersfeld) regards the continual
adjustment of perception and action to the external input as precisely what constitutes the
"entity", which is therefore far from being invariant.[9]

Glasersfeld considers an "invariant" as a target to be homed in upon, and a pragmatic necessity to

allow an initial measure of understanding to be established prior to the updating that a statement
aims to achieve. The invariant does not and need not represent an actuality, and Glasersfeld
describes it as extremely unlikely that what is desired or feared by an organism will never suffer
change as time goes on. This social constructionist theory thus allows for a needful evolutionary
adjustment.[10]

A mathematical theory of perception-in-action has been devised and investigated in many forms
of controlled movement, and has been described in many different species of organism using the
General Tau Theory. According to this theory, tau information, or time-to-goal information is the
fundamental 'percept' in perception.

[edit] Theories of visual perception

 Empirical theories of perception
 Anne Treisman's Feature Integration Theory
 Interactive Activation and Competition
 Irving Biederman's Recognition by Components Theory