Every day, we receive countless amount of stimulus from our world. Our iPhone rings and vibrates to tell us we have a text message. We walk through Coffman Union and see flyers for a concert next weekend. The ringing, vibrating, and seeing all has to be processed in order for us to understand them. In Chapter 4, we learn about sensations and perception. We may naively assume that our senses are flawless; however, we'll come to find that the way we perceive some sensations that are entirely twisted.
Look at the following image. What do you see?
Really, is there anything else?
This image is an example of a bistable image. These types of images show how we instantly decide what the central figure is and mainly ignore the background. In these types of pictures, there is another possibility for the central figure. In this picture, you either chose the women's face or the man playing the saxophone as the central figure. If you found it challenging to switch from what you originally saw, that's okay because there are limits in our abilities to transition.
Another example of errors in our perception comes from us creating a perceptual set; we let our expectations influence our perception. Click here to view a video that explains related studies. We made perceptual sets for the animals and then the faces and this affected what we thought the final image was. This shows that we tend to perceive our world based on our preconceptions.
Though we can have misled perceptions of our world, our brains do a pretty great job of sorting through all the signals that are sent to it.
