Nature of Perception Perception

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2.1.1 Perception

Perception is a common thing in almost all levels of human life. Since kids, people have tried to see things and their surroundings with their own way of seeing something. Adults employ perception in most of their relations and activities every day.

2.1.1.1 Nature of Perception

The phenomenon, on how people usually create perception in their daily life shows that it is formed since long time ago. It happened because it is the nature of a human. Russell 1997 proposes perception as an activity which is dealing with sensory core and stimulus. The role of sensory core is crucial in creating perception visual perception. Hatfield and Epstein 1979 stated in their book “Early Modern Perceptual Theory” that visual perception has two conscious states; mental representation of the two-dimensional retinal image and our experience of the “visual world” of the object distributed in depth. What is taken by our sensory core then should be correlated to our mental representation which creates the first conscious state. After that, the percipient will take his experience to correlate it to the mental representation he got before. That is how people start to respond and give opinion about what they see, what they hear, what they feel and what they think. People live their own way of thinking yet they are social creature who interact with other people and do so 16 many activities in their daily life. Thus, people are get used to make or create perception in their daily life. Theoretically, Russell 1997 states that in order to describe perception, one needs to know the theory of knowledge. There are two theories of knowledge; one that focuses on cognition and one that focuses on perceiving. Russell in his book “An inquiry into meaning and truth” 1997 focuses his explanation on perceiving. Russell 1997 defines perceiving as to accept the world appears as it is without being critical to it. From the definition, it emphasizes that perceiving is viewed with a view to determine whether it is cognition or not. If it is not, how it is related to the empirical knowledge of matters of fact will be explored. In his book, the empirical knowledge of the matters of fact is the prior knowledge or prior experience that one had before he or she perceived something new. This idea leads to another term proposed by Russell 1997 that is perceptive experience. Perceptive experience, as we perceive something, is the process where we relate our knowledge of experience in the past and our knowledge of the future and the unexpected past or present. Then, One correlates what he or she perceived to the past experience and future prediction. This correlation is bridging one to a new perception of the thing he or she perceived. Thus, the logical relation of empirical knowledge we have is stated clearly through this process to discover the new perception of something. On the other hand, the second theory of knowledge focuses on cognition. Kreitner and Kinicki 2008 state that perception is a cognitive process enabling people to interpret and understand their surroundings. This model of perception is 17 introduced by four-stage information-processing model; selective attentioncomprehension, encoding and simplification, storage and retention, and retrieval and response. The first three stages are to describe how specific information and environmental stimuli are observed and stored in the memory. The fourth stage is to describe how mental representations turn into real world judgments and decisions. The four-stage information-processing sequence which is proposed by Kreitner and Kinicki 2008 is described further as follows. 1. Selective attentioncomprehension Attention, according to Kreitner and Kinicki 2008, is the process of becoming consciously aware of something or someone. Attention can be focused on information either from the environment or from the memory. In the relation to the stimuli, Kreitner and Kinicki stated that people tend to pay attention to salient stimuli. Something is salient when it stands out from its context. People have tendency to pay more attention to negative than positive information which leads to a negativity bias. 2. Encoding and simplification Encoding as proposed by Kreitner and Kinicki 2008 is where the raw information is interpreted or translated into mental representations. In order to accomplish this, perceivers assign pieces of information to cognitive categories. Category is a number of objects that are considered equivalent. For categories of people, events, and objects, it is interpreted and evaluated by comparing their characteristics to information contained in schemata. A schema represents a person’s mental picture or summary 18 of a particular event or type of stimulus. Cognitive-category as stated previously is important to make the schemata meaningful, in the relation to encoding where the environment is being interpreted and evaluated. The interpretations and evaluations might be vary according to the four key reasons; first is people possess different information in the schemata used for interpretation, second is our moods and emotions influence our focus of attention and evaluations of others, third is people tend to apply recently used cognitive categories during encoding, and fourth is individual differences influence encoding. 3. Storage and retention This stage involves storage of information in a long-term memory. This long-term memory involves event memory which contains category of event, semantic memory which contains category of semantic materials, and person memory which contains category of people. Event memory is composed of categories containing information about both specific and general events. Semantic memory refers to general knowledge of the world. Person memory contains information on a single individual or groups of people. 4. Retrieval and response This stage shows that people retrieve information from the memory when they make judgments and decisions. Thus, judgments and decisions are either based on the process of drawing, interpreting and integrating the 19 categorical information stored in a long-term memory or on retrieving a summary judgment that was already made.

2.1.2 Critical Review