Perception

Perception is defined as a process by which we acquire mental images of our environment; we organize, interpret, and give meaning to sensations or messages that we receive with our senses (sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing). What one perceives is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture, and the interpretation of the perceived. If the percept does not have support in any of these perceptual bases it is unlikely to rise above perceptual threshold.


Perceptions are separate, and in several ways different, from conceptual understanding, for perception must work very fast (whereas we may take minutes or hours to ‘make up our minds’, and years to form new concepts). Also, it would be impossible for perception to draw upon all of our knowledge; and perceptions are of individual objects and events in present time, while concepts are abstract and generally timeless.
The theory that perception is ‘cognitive’, depending on inferences from essentially inadequate sensory signals, was first clearly proposed by the German polymath physicist, physiologist, and psychologist, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94). He called perceptions ‘unconscious inferences’. We might say that they (our most intimate experiences and knowledge) are simply hypotheses, essentially like the predictive hypotheses of science — though not always agreeing in particular accounts.


Factors that influence perception are as follows:

Culture
Heredity
Interests
Attitudes, Beliefs and Values
Needs
Peer pressure
Environmental background and Experience
Projection
Snap judgment
Halo effect/ Rusty Halo effect