Research suggests that implicit racial prejudice and stereotypes affect perception. Built from sensations, but influenced by our own experiences, biases, prejudices, and cultures, perceptions can be very different from person to person. In this module, you have learned that perception is a complex process. Presumably, our ability to interpret sensory information depends on what we label as figure and what we label as ground in any particular case, although this assumption has been called into question (Peterson & Gibson, 1994 Vecera & OвЂ™Reilly, 1998).Дig Deeper: The Depths of Perception: Bias, Prejudice, and Cultural Factors AsВ Figure 1В shows, our perception can vary tremendously, depending on what is perceived as figure and what is perceived as ground. Figure is the object or person that is the focus of the visual field, while the ground is the background.

According to this principle, we tend to segment our visual world into figure and ground. One Gestalt principle is the figure-ground relationship. As a result, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in the area of sensation and perception (Rock & Palmer, 1990). Gestalt psychologists translated these predictable ways into principles by which we organize sensory information.

In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. The word gestalt literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. This belief led to a new movement within the field of psychology known as Gestalt psychology. Wertheimer, and his assistants Wolfgang KГ¶hler and Kurt Koffka, who later became his partners, believed that perception involved more than simply combining sensory stimuli. In the early part of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer published a paper demonstrating that individuals perceived motion in rapidly flickering static images-an insight that came to him as he used a childвЂ™s toy tachistoscope.

Clerical perception definition