What Is Visual Perception? And Two Theorists And Their Theories

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

The brain is considered the most complex organ in the body. It is responsible for controlling motor function, the body’s ability to balance and the ability to translate information sent to the brain by sensory organs. The mind is described as the faculty of consciousness and thought. It’s where our feeling and emotions originate from and defines who we are as a person. The brain is composed of the visual cortex, which is responsible for processing visual information. In blind individuals the feature that makes up visions still exists in the visual cortex. These features are now used to process information received from the other senses. However, blind individuals are able to view the images because what’s in their mind.

Gibson’s and Gregory’s theories of perception both suggest that eye-retina is important for perception. The both believe that without eye-retina, a person will not be able to see. This is a common view of both of the theories of perception. The idea is supported by the case of SB. SB was a man who had been blind from birth due to cataracts. When he was 52, he had an operation which restored his sight and hence he could see. Thus, this case has shown the importance of eye-retina for things to be perceived. And therefore, supports both of theories of perception which eye-retina is essential for perception.

As vital organ of vision, the eye, allows us to learn more about the world around us more than any other organ or senses. Sight, the physical sensory experience and vision, the metaphysical concept of how our brain interprets images both work harmoniously and play a huge role in our everyday lives. However, almost a billion people are either blind or visually impaired simply due to not having a pair of glasses. Being able to lead people in the direction of good vision is what developed my interests.

Comparing Constructivist and Direct Theories of Visual Perception Two of the main theories of visual perception are constructivist and direct. Gregory is associated with the constructivist theory, while Gibson supports the direct theory. The both theories differ in their explanation of perception, however there are some aspects that relate them. Gregory's theory is a top down theory of perception, in the sense that he considers prior knowledge and experience to be crucially important in making sense of what we see.

The first thing that I learned about perception was earlier discovered by a psychologist by the name of Max Wertheimer. He discovered that our body clearly separates images into figures

The way a human eye and brain works together to produce visual data understandable to the

Our bodies are an amazing machine that interpret the world we live in using different processing systems. The visual information process is a system used to perceive our environment and send this information to our brain, the processing center of the body. One of the most important and often the initial sense used in perceiving our environment is vision. Vision may be the leading prominent sense we use in perception.

Vision is the most important sensory compared to other sensory modality therefore there is a wide range of research carried out on vision. Visual attention is defined as a term that portrays how individuals are able to change their view while attending to an image that is of a normal perspective due to the neurones in the cortex (Carasco, 2011). It is often described as a focal point which is situated with different locations in the region of space (Wright, 1998). Visual search requires detecting a specific target as quickly as possible. For example, trying to find your car in a large car park. By focusing our attention to the specific environment it improves our visual search of the target (Keane et al., 2015). The speed of a visual search

Vision is one of the most valuable sensory modalities. It is also the source of an impressive display of research questions relating to how we see, how and why vision fails, and what can be done about it.

Sajda, Paul, and Leif Finkel. "Intermediate-Level Visual Representations and the Construction of Surface Perception." Web. 8 July 2015.

Sense perception can be defined as how we see and interpret the world through our five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. They are an important source of knowledge since they enable us most of the times to be conscious of the outside world. Perception consists of both sensation and interpretation. Sensation is the stimulation of a sensory receptor which produces neural impulses which the brain then interprets as visual image, sound, taste, pain, etc. Interpretation is how the information is then seen and processed in our brain. There are both strengths and weaknesses of sense perception as a way of knowing which I will talk about in my essay.

We see things with our eyes through different visual cues this is called “Depth Perception”. “Depth perception is the use of two different types of visual cues to perceive depth, Binocular cues and Monocular cues” (Department of Psychology,2015). “Depth perception lets us view items in three dimensions and the distance of items. We use several cues to perceive the distance (or depth) of the objects from us and from each other” (Department of Psychology,2015). Goldstein (1984) stated that Cues for seeing depth come from binocular disparity, and also from a range of monocular cues such as motion parallax, linear perspective, relative size, interposition, relative height, and texture gradients. (as cited in Laboratory Manual: Psychology 111/112