Perception - Why Do Things Look the Way They Do?

The Gestalt Laws: Is Our Perception of the World Due to Inborn Organizing Tendencies?

Max Wertheimer proposed a set of supplemental inborn organizing tendencies, or Gestalt laws. (The Gestalt laws are also traditionally called innate tendencies, which simply means “inborn.”) First, proximity refers to the nearness of the elements that make up a perception.  Second, similarity refers to characteristics that elements have in common. Third, closure is the tendency to fill in gaps in information and make a perceptual object into a complete whole. Fourth, common fate exists when all of the elements of a perceptual object move or act together.

Learned Aspects of Perception: Is the Infant’s World a Buzzing, Blooming Confusion?

The research of the Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb suggests that repeated firings form a cell assembly, a stable group of neurons that are used over and over by the brain to create a representation of the external pattern. A pattern can, of course, be quite complex. If this is so, a given cell assembly may represent only a portion of a pattern. Hebb called a set of cell assemblies grouped together to form a larger pattern a phase sequence. The existence of cell assemblies helps account for a memory of patterns and perceptual objects. When you hear a melody or recognize something you have seen before, it is quite possibly because an established cell assembly is firing.

Illusions: What Do They Teach Us about Perception?

An illusion is a false perception, a perception that does not fit an objective description of a stimulus situation It is important to distinguish the concept of an illusion from a delusion and a hallucination. A delusion is a false belief. A hallucination is a perception created by the individual. It has no relationship to reality at all.

Illusions teach us that perceptions are, to some extent, created by the brain and nervous system, that we are not passive observers of our world.

What we learn from illusions is that the world appears to us the way it does not only because it actually is the way it is. We also interpret sensory information, transforming it into a constructed perceptual, or psychological, world. And it is our perception of the world that determines much of our behavior.

Depth Perception: Living in a Three-dimensional World.

Depth perception is made possible by various cues, signals or stimuli that provide an observer with information. Depth perception is made possible by cues arising from binocular vision and monocular vision.

Binocular vision is vision with two eyes. The principal cue for depth perception associated with binocular vision is retinal disparity. The whole image, in part because of retinal disparity, appears to be three-dimensional.

Monocular vision is vision with one eye and are available to one eye. These are the kinds of cues that give a landscape painting depth.

A first monocular cue is linear perspective, the tendency of parallel lines to seem to converge as they approach the horizon. A second monocular cue is interposition, a cue created when one object blocks some portion of another object. A third monocular cue is shadows. Shadows are differences in illumination gradients. A fourth monocular cue is texture gradient. A texture gradient is perceived when we can see less detail in far away objects than those that are closer to us. A fifth monocular cue is motion parallax, the tendency when moving forward fairly rapidly to perceive differential speeds in objects that are passing by and in those that are being approached.

All of these monocular cues work together to enhance depth perception.

Extrasensory Perception: Is It Real?

Telepathy belongs to a larger category of phenomena called extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perception, or ESP, is the capacity to be aware of external events without the use of one of the conventional senses such as vision or hearing. ESP is referred to as the sixth sense, but ESP should more accurately be called the eighth sense.

There are three kinds of extrasensory perception:(1) precognition, (2) telepathy, and (3) clairvoyance. Precognition is the power to know what will happen in the future. Telepathy is the power to send and receive mental messages. The ability to read the minds of people who can’t read yours is also considered to be a telepathic power. Clairvoyance is the power to have visions and “see” something out of the range of normal vision.

Although not a form of ESP, there is another power often associated with it. This is psychokinesis or PK. Psychokinesis is the power to move objects using only energy transmitted by the mind.