What is Perception?

Introduction

Perception forms one of the main concepts in modern psychology due to a number of factors (Ionescu et al., 2022). On the one hand, it defines the recognition of any incoming sensory information. Since the earliest times, this process was crucial for our survival. The dominant channels such as audial, visual or kinaesthetic ones largely determine the capability to recognise certain cues in the external environment. On the other hand, our perception also defines the way people respond to these external challenges (Dosher and Lu, 2020). If the incoming information is fractional, incomplete or biased, this impairs the capability to make informed decisions and engage in productive behaviours. The complexity of this concept has led to the development of multiple research approaches that also incorporate recent medical studies in this field. This essay explores the concept of perception in psychology from the standpoint of its both physiological meanings and the theories of perception explaining its influence on the way people react to different situations.

Physiological Perception Components

From a physiological standpoint, perception is based on a number of sensory systems including sight, hearing, physical sensations, taste, and others (Fish, 2021). These organs capture external information and convert it into signals transferred by the nervous system and processed by the brain. With that being said, such authors as Marken (2021) note that perception is not limited by the passive input of data. The processed information is recognised on the basis of past memories, interiorised knowledge systems such as languages, and other cognitive mechanisms. This means that it is compared with some existing reference systems, which inevitably affects the perception process itself. For example, people from different countries call the same wavelength reflection by different terms referring to colour in their native languages (Coren and Girgus, 2022). From a psychology standpoint, this also means that information input may not be processed in full or may be discarded due to physiological or psychological traumas. In this scenario, a colour-blind person will not recognise the red colour while a person while people with perceptual dysfunctions may experience hallucinations created by their brain cells even if the information producing them is not present in the sensory system.

Sensory organs include eyes, ears, nose, skin, and mouth that are responsible for multiple sensory systems including the visual system, the auditory system, the olfactory system, the somatosensory system, and the gustatory system correspondingly (Lee et al., 2019). Additionally, there exist internal mechanisms such as the inner ear or interoception elements that help humans analyse their inner sensations such as pain, discomfort or tension. These two systems may overlap as a sense of hunger may force people to actively look for food-like objects in the nearby environment. Similarly, some colours, smells or kinaesthetic experiences may create a range of inner physiological response options ranging from relaxation to nausea or vertigo (Skov and Nadal, 2022). The systems are linked via the transduction mechanisms involving sensory receptors including cone and rode cells in human eyes and hair cells in the inner ear. These incoming signals are coded into electrical signals sent forth to the brain. However, physiological problems may create different sorts of distortion in these mechanisms. As a result, such information may not be registered properly or may not be properly delivered and coded, which leads to cognitive errors.

With that being said, perception channels do not operate in isolation, which creates the multimodal stimuli effect (Cheng et al., 2021). As a result, visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic information may have a greater cumulative impact. This effect is widely applied in advertising and entertainment spheres as well as sound and visual arts. On the one hand, some researchers suggest that these spheres utilise the evolutionary models embedded at a physiological level to trigger certain emotions and stimulus-response mechanisms. They are deemed responsible for people seeing certain colour combinations or sounds as pleasant or unpleasant due to their alignment with deeply interiorised survival instincts. On the other hand, such authors as Pautz (2021) note that such positive or negative connotations may be culturally interiorised during a person’s growth and socialisation. In this scenario, the incoming information is viewed as a system of complex symbols rather than a stream of sheer perception without any references to existing views and memories. This standpoint may be partially supported by the earlier discussed concept of multimodal integration where physical objects are simultaneously perceived through a combination of perceptual expe