Perception (Psychology)

The process of acquiring, selecting, interpreting, and organizing sensory information in the mind. Human beings perceive their environment and interpret information taken in through the senses. Human attention is selective in that we selectively attend to certain information while relegating other information to the background. There are a number of theories on how we perceive inform ation and interpret and process it. The most well-known is the work of Gestalt psychologists, who believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, when you see a single dot, you perceive it as such, but when you see five dots grouped together, you see a line of dots and do not perceive them individually. They outlined several principles that influence the way we organize basic sensory input into whole patterns, such as [Page 376]figure and ground theory, grouping, perceptual constancies, and illusions. For more information, see Gibson (1987).