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Perception: It is the process of organizing and interpreting
incoming sensory information.
A person’s perception can be different from the perception
of others.
Perception can be caused by internal and external factors.
Internal factories are things inside your body, and external
factors are factors that affect you from the outside. The
internal factors that can influence perception are many.
 Gestalt:
The “whole”, or the organizational
patterns that we tend to perceive; the
gestalt psychologists emphasized that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Figure-ground relationships: The organization of the visual
field into objects(figures) that stand out from their
surroundings(ground).
Figure: in most photographs and visual scenes it can be
easily picked out. It will be some object that draws your
attention, and it probably will be nearer the center of the
visual field than the edge. It may be moving, and it will
often be fairly large and colorful.
Ground: it consists of the surroundings aspects that we
commonly call the background.
 Grouping:
the perceptual tendency to
organize stimuli into understandable units.
 There are 4 kinds of principles that guide
the way we group stimuli: Similarity,
Proximity, Closure, and Continuity.
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Similarity: It is the most basic principle of grouping.
We place items that look similar in the same group.
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Proximity: It comes from the word approximate, which
means close. If objects are close together, we place
them in the same group.
The 9 cubes are placed without proximity, this
indicates to us that they are separate squares.
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They are placed with proximity, they are now one
group.
 Closure:
It is our brain’s tendency to look for
the whole, not the parts, drives us to fill any
gaps in a perceptual field.
 Continuity:
Once an object appears to move
in a particular direction, your brain assumes
that the movement continues unchanged.
 Depth
perception: the ability to see in three
dimensions and to judge distance. You rely
on your ability to perceive depth in parking,
determining when it’s safe to pull out onto a
busy street, and deciding if you can and
should pass another car.
 Visual cliff: a laboratory device for testing
depth perception in infants and young
animals that Eleanor Gibson and Richard
Walk used to determine whether the depth
perception was a product of nature or
nurture.
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It ensures the infant’s safety while allowing researchers to
determine whether an infant perceives depth. Gibson and
Walk’s research showed that even young infants just barely
able to crawl are reluctant to move past the edge of what
appears to be a drop-off. This demonstrated them that
their research supports the nature view. Depth perception
exists even for animals mobile at birth.
But it also supports the nurture view. Because by the time
children can crawl, they have already had a lot of
interaction with the environment, so their reluctance to
venture over the edge of a cliff can be learned.
By
working together, your eyes
and brain use a number of tricks
to create the third dimension.
Some depth cues are: binocular
cues(requiring both eyes) and
monocular cues(requiring only
the use of a single eye).
Binocular cues: when you look through a view
master toy, the astounding depth is caused by
the retinal disparity.
 Retinal disparity: It is a binocular depth cue
resulting from slightly different images produced
by the retina of the left eye and the retina of
the right eye.
 The images differ slightly because they were
taken by cameras a couple of feet apart, with
slightly different vantage points. Your brain uses
the different views to calculate distance and add
depth to the scene. Your brain does this easily
because it uses the same technique all the time
in real life.
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 The
second binocular cue-convergence:
translates tension in the eye muscles
when the eyes track inward to focus on
objects close to the viewer. The more
tension required to keep both eyes aimed
at the object, the closer the object must
be. It predicts depth most effectively at
relatively short distances.
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Monocular depth cues: Artists use monocular cues to build
a sense of depth into their paintings and drawings. There
are 7 cues.
-Relative size: the perceived size of an object. When an
object of known size appears small, it is probably because
it is distant. (ex-airplane’s size while flying)
-Relative motion: Perceived slowness indicates an object is
distant. (airplane’s speed)
-Interposition: Closer objects partially obstruct the view of
more distant objects.(ex-tree in front of the house)
 Relative
height: Distant objects appear
relatively higher in your field of vision than
close objects do.
 -Texture
gradient: Distant objects usually
have a smoother texture than nearby objects.
(grass from far away than closer grass)
 -Relative
clarity: distant objects are less
clear than nearby objects are. (blurriness)
 -Linear
perspective: Parallel lines seem to
draw together in the distance.
 Perceptual
constancy: perceiving the
size, shape, and lightness of an
object as unchanging even as the
image of the object on the retina of
the eye changes.
 3 major kinds of perceptual
constancy: size constancy, shape
constancy, and lightness constancy.
 Our
knowledge of the world leads us to
conclude that when the apparent size of an
object changes the actual size is not
changing at all. What’s changing is the
distance. Size constancy allows us to be
comfortable in our knowledge that the
objects around us are not changing.
 It
assures us that an object’s shape
has not changed even though our
angle of view indicates it may have
done so.
Lightness
constancy: gives us
the ability to see an object
as having a constant level of
lightness no matter how the
lighting conditions change.
Perceptual set: a mental predisposition to
perceive something one way and not another.
 Example: listening to music from the
Beatles(played backwards) and hearing Paul is
dead.
 Perceptual set is often guided by
schemas(concepts or mental frameworks that
help us organize and interpret information about
the world).
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 Illusion
1:
the Muller-Lyer illusion-
 Illusion
2:
the ames room-
 Thinking
about psychology, the science of
mind and behavior; Charles T.Blair-Broeker;
2008
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
 http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutori
als/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.ht
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