11 awareness to select and organize the object in order to perceive it. How people
perceive an identified object is influenced by the background experience that people have. This background experience will help us to select and organize the
object or stimulus. Therefore, perception is about the process itself. Altman 1985: 85 describes perception as the way stimuly are selected
and grouped by a person so that they can be meaningfully interpreted”. How people work with their environment and understand it so that they can have a
picture of it. The interpretation of having the picture about a condition refers to the perception itself. It is similar with what is stated by Gibson 1997: 97
“Perception is organizing the information from the environment so that it makes sense”.
Stein 1982 cited in Ponty, M. 1962: 7 stated that “…. The series stimulus – impression – perception is a sequent event at the end of which
perception begins”. It is seen that every perception is a new birth of consciousness. This process of perceiving is related to personal sense of
perceptual experience, which will be translated so that every person is able to have different interpretation toward an object or stimulus. Hence, it is important to
realize that there are many theories, which are relevant with this topic. That is why people need to have a framework as a guideline of knowing perception.
a. Selecting Attention
“Selecting is the process when the brain manages to sort out the important messages and discard the rest” Huffman, 2000: 108. In this condition
12 people try to give attention to an object, which is considered more important than
the others. It means that when people select an object or a sensory data they tend to give their attention to that identified object and ignore the others. For example:
when a girl sees so many kinds of flowers in front of her and she chooses a bucket of red rose. The process of selective attention happens here because the girl has
chosen the stimuli to which object she will give her attention. Therefore, she finally chooses a bucket of red flower then the others.
Altman, 1985: 86 stated that “the process of selecting occurs when we focus on only a small number of all the stimuli with which we are surround us”.
Selecting really influence people in recognizing information, as this is the first step in perceiving object. This activity determines the next impression so that it
will decide whether people will give attention to an object or not. It means that if people give attention toward an object they will perceive this identified object.
For example, look at this following picture:
Figure 2.1 What is it? Huffman, 2000: 107
13 Look at the figure 1. People who see this object might say that it is just
an unreal object. There are only splotches of light and dark. It can be difficult to realize or perceive that these splotches of light and dark can be a real pattern. In
this condition the process of selection happens to help people to have a picture of mind toward the object so that they can see it from different angle. The ability to
focus their attention to an angle to understand the meaning of the whole picture will help them to perceive the identified object.
“If we look at the figure long enough, our brain will arrange the stimulus into a recognizable object so that you will see a real pattern” Huffman, 2007:
108. Based on the figure 1, when the selecting process happens people might see a real picture of a cow but people also can see other things according to their own
perception. It is based on which spot people give and focus their attention. It means that the result of perceiving the same object can be varies for every one.
b. Organizing
