Environmental Perception

Perceiving the Environment

Humans perceive the environment through their senses. The senses by which we perceive the environment include the hepatic (touch), olfactory (smell), auditory (hearing), and visual (sight). Senses vary in terms of the range of space that can be perceived: The hepatic zone is the immediate perception of differences of pressure and temperature on our skin, while the olfactory, auditory, and visual zones vary with the strength of the surrounding stimuli and the acuity of individual senses. Each person perceives the environment within a personally developed “filter” that incorporates personal history and experiences, which may also vary with mood, purpose, and focus. The “filter” through which we perceive our environment is shaped through culture, custom, beliefs, and desires.

Reginald Golledge and Robert Stimson outlined the problems in defining perception and how it relates to cognition. Some geographers use perception to describe how aspects of the environment are remembered or recalled. In planning and architecture, perception can refer to common interests between groups and individuals in the design process. In psychology, perception is viewed as a subprocess of cognition. Perception is the immediate stimulus-dependent interpretation of the environment through the senses, while cognition refers to how we link that initial interpretation with past experience and how we may project that interpretation into the future. Robert Lloyd defined perception as the cognitive process that is directly involved with the detection and interpretation of sensory information. Regardless of the varying ways in which researchers in different fields define perception and differentiate between perception and cognition, it can be agreed that perception involves how the mind interfaces with the environment.

Perception also means understanding. Environmental perception under this definition extends the scope of the concept from the act of sensing the environment to the understanding of the environment gained by integrating that which we sense. It also extends into the decisions and actions that people take based on that understanding and thus blends into the study of spatial behavior or behavioral geography. Environmental perception has developed as a field of geography incorporating both the perceptual and the cognitive processes in human relationships with the environment. As a result of the multiple definitions of perception outlined above, many geographers use perception and cognition interchangeably, along with the terms environmental perception and spatial cognition.

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