perception summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see perception.

perception, Process of registering sensory stimuli as meaningful experience. The differences between sensation and perception have varied according to how the terms are defined. A common distinction is that sensations are simple sensory experiences, while percepts are complex constructions of simple elements joined through association. Another is that perception is more subject to the influence of learning. Though hearing, smell, touch, and taste perceptions have all been explored, vision has received the most attention. Structuralist researchers such as Edward Bradford Titchener focused on the constituent elements of visual perceptions, whereas Gestalt psychology has stressed the need to examine organized wholes, believing humans are disposed to identifying patterns. Visual objects tend to appear stable despite continually changing stimulus features (such as ambient light, perspective, ground vs. figure arrangement), which enables an observer to match a perceived object with the object as it is understood to exist. Perceptions may be influenced by expectations, needs, unconscious ideas, values, and conflicts.

Max Wertheimer Summary

Max Wertheimer Czech-born psychologist, one of the founders, with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, of Gestalt psychology (q.v.), which attempts to examine psychological phenomena as structural wholes, rather than breaking them down into components. During his adolescence, Wertheimer played the

Henri Tajfel Summary

Henri Tajfel Polish-born British social psychologist, best known for his concept of social identity, a central idea in what became known as social identity theory. He is remembered in Europe for the effort he gave to establishing a European style of social psychology, one that recognized the

George Berkeley Summary

George Berkeley Anglo-Irish Anglican bishop, philosopher, and scientist best known for his empiricist and idealist philosophy, which holds that reality consists only of minds and their ideas; everything save the spiritual exists only insofar as it is perceived by the senses. Berkeley was the eldest

hallucination Summary

Hallucination, the experience of perceiving objects or events that do not have an external source, such as hearing one’s name called by a voice that no one else seems to hear. A hallucination is distinguished from an illusion, which is a misinterpretation of an actual stimulus. A historical survey