Psychology of perception: what is it?

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The psychology of perception is a subfield of psychology that aims to understand and explain how humans and other animals receive information about the external world through perception and through various cognitive processes. The question of perception is also incredibly important in philosophy and some other related fields, but the psychology of perception is generally based on an experimental scientific approach to the questions of interest. The perception process begins with some physical aspect of the environment. That environmental factor interacts with the sensory organs and is processed by the brain. Only after information obtained from the environment has been processed by the brain is effective conscious perception possible, and this is often subject to a variety of cognitive processes that can subtly alter the nature of what is perceived.

The first point of interest in the psychology of perception is the receipt of sensory information from one’s environment. One cannot hope to understand the psychological aspects of perception without knowing how the physical aspects work. Sensory information from the environment, such as light or sound, must interact with the sensory organs for perception to be possible. A central problem in the psychology of perception is that conscious perception does not provide a perfectly accurate and unbiased view of the physical environment based on that sensory input. Conscious perception instead occurs when that sensory information undergoes a variety of neurological and psychological processes that distort and alter the view of the external environment.

Neural processing, which occurs even before conscious perception, is another important focus of the psychology of perception. Sensory stimuli, interacting with the sense organs, are converted into electrical impulses that progress through a variety of pathways in the brain. Researchers in the field of psychology of perception are interested in how these neurological processes affect consciously perceived stimuli. They may, for example, study individuals who have brain injuries to attempt to determine how physical damage to the brain affects the ultimate outcome of conscious perception.

A variety of cognitive processes also influence conscious perception and are, consequently, of great importance in the field of the psychology of perception. A variety of cognitive processes are responsible for enabling people to derive meaning from derived sensory input. They allow, for example, facial recognition, the ability to read and associations between known information and a given perceived environmental factor. Much research in this field focuses on these cognitive processes because they substantially alter how people perceive their environments, and because many of these processes are conscious, they are in many ways more accessible than the physical and neurological aspects of perception.

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