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b. Perceptual Process
Based on Altman 1985, there are several factors that influence per son‟s
perception. The four important factors are selection of stimuli, organization of stimuli, the situation,
and the person‟s self-concept. Those four factors are very important to be known in order to see what kinds of perceptions that someone has
p. 86. The first factor in perceptual process is selection of the stimuli. Selection
is one of reasons why people perceive things differently. Each person selects specific cues and filters out the others. The second perceptual process is
organization of stimuli. After the information has undergone the screening process, it must be arranged to become meaningful. The third perceptual process is the
situation. Situation as well as someone past experiences affects what the person perceives. Perceiving a situation accurately is also related to how well a person
adjusts his or her behavior to the situations. The fourth perceptual process is self-concept. Self-concept is the way people feel about and perceive themselves.
The way people see themselves affects their perception of the world around them. Altman 1985 figures the perceptual process as in this picture below:
Figure 2.1 Perceptual Process Source: Altman, 1985, p. 85
11 Huffman 2000 explains three steps in the perception. The first step in
perception is selection the stimuli. Selection is choosing the stimuli to which people will pay attention. Selective attention directs the attention to the most
important aspect of the environment p. 108. Huffman also states that there are three major factors involved in any selection decisions. They are physiological
factors, stimulus factors and psychological factors. 1
Physiological Factors The basic mechanisms for perceptual selection are built into the brain,
but a certain amount of interaction with the environment is apparently necessary for feature detector cells to develop normally. A physiological factor is a
biological influence on selection. There are two major factors of physiological, they are feature detectors and habituation. The eature detectors are specialized
cells in the brain that is distinguished between different sensory inputs. Another physiological factor is habituation. Habituation refers to the tendency of the brain
to ignore environmental factors that remain constant. The brain seems “prewired” to pay more attention to the changes in the environment than to the stimuli that
remain constants. 2
Stimulus Factors The stimulus factors refer to the environmental influences on the
selection. When given a wide variety of stimuli, people automatically select the stimuli that are intense, novel, moving, contrasting, or repetitious. So, the stimuli
that people have are influenced by the environment where they live. Their surrounding is the reason how people stimuli are built.
12 3
Psychological Factors The psychological factors refer to the influences on selection. Motivation
and personal needs are two factors why people attend to some stimuli and not to others. What people choose to perceive is determined largely by their current level
of satisfaction or deprivation. Students will have positive stimuli and it will also create positive interpretation if they have motivation that by using their group
video students will get a lot of benefits and students have personal needs to practice speaking English. It is clearly showed that motivation and personal needs
influence the stimuli. In this psychological factor there is a subliminal stimulus. A subliminal stimulus occurs below the threshold of people
‟s conscious awareness. Therefore, people sometimes do not realize that the stimuli that they have are
influenced by their own motivations and also satisfactions. The second step in perception is organization. People must organize the
selected incoming information into patterns and principles that will help them to understand the world. Data is organized in four several ways: form, perceptual
constancy, depth, and color. First way is the form. Basic principles of the form are figure and ground, reversible figure, proximity, continuity, closure, contiguity and
similarity. Second, the perceptual constancy allows perception of a stable environment even though actual sensory data may be constantly changing. The
constancy is based on prior experiences and learning. The types of constancy are size constancy, shape constancy, color constancy and brightness constancy. Third
is depth that means the role of experience and learning in the organizations of perceptions is particularly clear. Fourth is color, it is a combination of two theories.