Perception (psychology), Lecture notes of Psychology

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PERCEPTION

Factors affecting Perception

• 1. Factors related to the perceiver
• 2. Factors related to the perceived
• 3. Factors related to the situation

Factors related to Perceived

• Status of the perceived: when perception is made about a person who has high status in terms of position or wealth, he is generally perceived to be high on ranking than a person with low status.
• Closeness with the perceived- If a person is close to another person in relationship, the perceived will be ranked high because of this relationship even though, in a particular situation, he may behaved negatively.

Factors related to the Situation

• Situation plays an important role in forming perception about a person.
• Example- A person sitting in a five star hotel is perceived differently than a person sitting in a small hotel.

SELECTION

• (^) Selection is the process by which we attend to some stimuli in our environment and not others.
• (^) Selection is often influenced by internal stimuli like our personal motives, incentives, impulses, or drives to act a certain way.
• (^) Selection is often influence by external stimuli, such as bright lights and colors, loud sounds, strong odors, spicy flavours, or painful contact.
• (^) Cocktail party effect- the phenomenon of being able to selectively focus on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli in the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room or notice their name being spoken in another conversation.

Figure and Ground

• What a person observes is dependent on how a central figure is being separated from its background.
• The perceiver thus tends to organise only the information which stands out in the environment which seems to be significant to the individual.
• Example- In a dance programme, the spectators’ tend to perceive the dance performance against the back

3. Interpretation

• Interpretation is the last stage of perception process through which we represent and understand stimuli.
• Once information is organised into categories, we superimpose it onto our lives to give them meaning.
• Interpretation of stimuli is subjective, which means that individuals can come to different conclusions about the exact same stimuli.
• Subjective interpretation of stimuli is affected by individual values, needs, beliefs, experiences, expectations, self- concept and other personal factors.