Perception: Nativism vs. Empiricism

• Perception is the process of receiving information to make sense of the world.
• Perception is essential to learning.
• The study of perception identifies how interpretation and sensory information organization produces conscious experience of objects and their relationships.
• Individuals organize and interpret sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment through perception.
• Perception is when people regard, analyze, retrieve, and react to information from the environment.
• Some people associate happiness with earning money, while others associate it with spending money.

Nativism-Empiricism

• Empiricists believe all information is acquired via experience through the senses.
• Empiricists view the mind as a blank slate.
• John Locke led the British empiricist movement.
• Nativists believe some information is innate.
• Nativists believe the mind contains itself.
• Immanuel Kant led the German nativist movement.

The Perceptual Process

• Object leading to Awareness, Recognition, next is Interpretation, and finally, a Response.
• The study of perceptual influences includes the situation, the perceiver, and the target.

Reception and Selection in the Perceptual Process

• Information is received through stimuli in the reception process.
• Selection is governed by two types of factors: external and internal.
• External factors include size, intensity, proximity, motion, and novelty.
• Internal factors include attitude, motives, experiences, and interests.

Organization within the Perceptual Process

• Organization sorts stimuli into a meaningful pattern with grouping, proximity, and closure.
• Grouping assembles stimuli based on similarity.
• Proximity is how the closeness of stimuli affects perception.
• Stimuli must be organized to create a whole pattern through closure.

Interpretation within the Perceptual Process

• Interpretation forms an idea about sensed, selected, and organized information.
• The primacy/recency effect is involved with interpretation.
• The first impression is most important and is known as the primacy effect.
• The recency effect dictates that human beings remember the latest events more than less recent ones.

Influences within the Perceptual Process

• Forming a belief about a category and generalizing that notion to encounters with each member of that category causes stereotyping.
• There is a difference between the perceived notion of each category and the actual traits of the members.
• Stereotyping may affect the interview process in an organization.
• The halo effect generalizes from an analysis to a single attribute or trait.
• A negative halo effect is also known as the reverse halo effect.
• Selective perception occurs when a person sees, feels, or hears what they want to and skips inconsistent information.
• The expectancy effect is the tendency to interpret a person or object based on expectations and is also called the Pygmalion effect.

Why Study Perceptions?

• To better understand reality, which is affected by biases, beliefs, and emotional state.
• The world is interpreted to make sense of it.
• The attribution process guides behavior by interpreting the causes of events or behavior.

Factors That Influence Perception

• The situation influences perception, and includes time, the work setting, and the social setting.
• The perceiver influences perception through attitudes, background, interest, experience, and expectation.
• The target influences perception through novelty, motion, sounds, size, and proximity.

Explore perception as the process of interpreting information to understand the world. Contrast empiricism, which views the mind as a blank slate shaped by experience, with nativism, which posits innate knowledge. Examine the perceptual process from object to awareness.