Psychology
Visual sensation and visual perception enable us to receive information from the world around us and convert the gathered information into a form that provides meaning and understanding. Both sensation and perception are vital in forming an understanding of the world around us, combined they create the Complete Perceptual Experience (CPE). The process of visual sensation begins with reception. Reception is the detection of a stimuli (light) onto receptor cells in the eye, casting an image on the retina. The next stage is transduction. This involves transforming the physical energy of light that has been reflected by objects in the environment, into electrochemical energy which is transmitted to the brain. After transduction the electrochemical information is sent via the neurons along the spinal chord and received by the brain. This stage is called transmission. There is no actual distinct point in the total process of visual perception where sensation stops and perception begins as it is a continued cycle of receiving and interpreting information. Perception is a psychological and physiological process that involves the selection, organisation and interpretation of the visual information being transmitt
Depth cues are also vital in perceiving an image as they help to define where an object is located in an environment. This is necessary in being able to judge the distance between objects, safely enabling us to perform such tasks as placing a cup on the table. Perceptual constancy's are the ability to perceive our environment and the objects within it as stable despite the changing image cast on the retina. Size remains constant by the unconscious application of the size constancy principle. This principle can be observed when facing a person and watching them walk away, the image on our retina gets smaller yet we do not think that the person walking away is actually shrinking. Their size remains constant. Whereas sensation is a process that is the same for everyone, each person may perceive things differently as can be more clearly explained by the use of this example; My friend and I were walking through a park when we were approached by a large dog. We both received the same image of the dog on our retina (sensation) yet my friend perceived the dog as being threatening due to being bitten by a similar dog not long ago. I perceived the dog as being friendly and playful because I grew up with a dog as a household pet. This illustrates the ways in which two people can perceive the same stimuli due to prior experience. An example of this is the Muller-Lyer Illusion (Muller-Lyer 1989) where two lines of equal length are drawn but each has opposite shaped heads, one being 'arrow heads' and the other 'feather tails'. 10 subjects were selected and asked 'Which line is longer?' Results show that subjects most often choose the feather tailed line, due to a misapplication of size consistency (Gregory 1966). It has also been said that this illusion is culturally bias as the arrow head line is representative of the outside edge of a building and the feather tails can be compared to the inside corner of a building. This is what evokes the illusion, even when subjects are informed that they are in fact the exact same length, one still seems longer. The process of a Complete Perceptual Experience as a whole is complex, yet performed
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Approximate Word count = 1448
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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