Noun

Singular perception

Plural perceptions

perception (plural perceptions)

1. Conscious understanding of something.
2. Vision (ability)
3. Acuity
4. (cognition) That which is detected by the five senses; not necessarily understood (imagine looking through fog, trying to understand if you see a small dog or a cat); also that which is detected within consciousness as a thought, intuition, deduction, etc.

Related terms

• perceive
• percept

Arthur L. Benton · David Bohm António Damásio · Phineas Gage Norman Geschwind · Elkhonon Goldberg Patricia Goldman Rakic · Pasko Rakic Donald O. Hebb · Kenneth Heilman Edith Kaplan · Muriel Lezak Benjamin Libet · Rodolfo Llinás Alexander Luria · Brenda Milner Karl H. Pribram · Oliver Sacks Roger W. Sperry · H. M. · K. C.

Bender-Gestalt Test Benton Visual Retention Test Clinical Dementia Rating Continuous Performance Task Glasgow Coma Scale Hayling and Brixton tests Johari window · Lexical decision task Mini-mental state examination Stroop effect Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Wisconsin card sorting

In philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, a goal which is still very far from fruition. The word comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses."

Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative law in psychology is the Weber-Fechner law, which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of physical stimuli and their perceptual effects. The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approach.

What one perceives is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture, and the interpretation of the perceived. If the percept does not have support in any of these perceptual bases it is unlikely to rise above perceptual threshold.

This page is for quotes relating to Perception.

• "Only through observation will you perceive weakness". - Charles Darwin

• Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
  • Douglas Adams, in Mostly Harmless (Chapter 9)

• A bird that flies from the ground onto an anthill, does not know that it is still on the ground.
  • African Proverb

• A Mind is it's own place and can make a hell of heaven; or a heaven of hell - Anonymous

• Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• I see the same sadness in the eyes of conformists as I do in the eyes of those convulsing radically in opposition. I talk to people that aren't like me, individually, thoughtfully. And I listen. If I walk away from a conversation thinking differently than before I entered into it, I have succeeded in doing something that doesn't compute. If I haven't interacted and challenged what I know, resulting in a change of perception, I am still running my own set of stupid old programs.
  • Paul J. Schrag, in Adbusters (2003)

• In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
  • Desiderius Erasmus in Adages (1500)

• It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
  • C.W. Leadbeater

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
  • Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Tue Jul 7 20:54:16 2009