Selection, the first stage of perception, is the process through which we attend to some stimuli in our environment and not others. Most of us are presented with millions of sensory stimuli a day. How do we know what to attend to and what to ignore? Though perception is different for each person, we each attend to the stimuli that are meaningful in our individual worlds.
Selection is the process by which we attend to some stimuli in our environment and not others. Motivation has an enormous impact on the perceptions people form about the world. Long-term motivations also influence what stimuli we attend to. For example, an art historian who has spent many years looking at visual art might be more likely to pay attention to the detailed carvings on the outside of a building; an architect might be more likely to notice the structure of the columns supporting the building.
Perceptual expectancy, also called perceptual set, is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way based on expectations and assumptions about the world. Emotional drives can also influence the selective attention humans pay to stimuli. Some examples of this phenomenon are:. Selective attention shows up across all ages. This shows that infants selectively attend to specific stimuli in their environment. Their accuracy in noticing these physical differences amid background noise improves over time.
Cocktail Party Effect : One will selectively attend to their name being spoken in a crowded room, even if they were not listening for it to begin with. A stimulus that is particularly intense, like a bright light or bright color, a loud sound, a strong odor, a spicy taste, or a painful contact, is most likely to catch your attention.
Evolutionary psychologists theorize that we selectively attend to these kinds of stimuli for survival purposes. Humans who could attend closely to these stimuli were more likely to survive than their counterparts, since some intense stimuli like pain, powerful smells, or loud noises can indicate danger. Organization is the stage in the perception process in which we mentally arrange stimuli into meaningful and comprehensible patterns.
After the brain has decided which of the millions of stimuli it will attend to, it needs to organize the information that it has taken in. Below is a discussion of some of the different ways we organize stimuli. The Gestalt laws of grouping is a set of principles in psychology first proposed by Gestalt psychologists to explain how humans naturally perceive stimuli as organized patterns and objects.
Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws of our ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.
The gestalt effect is the capability of our brain to generate whole forms, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of global figures, instead of just collections of simpler and unrelated elements. Essentially, gestalt psychology says that our brain groups elements together whenever possible instead of keeping them as separate elements. A few of these laws of grouping include the laws of proximity, similarity, and closure and the figure-ground law.
This law posits that when we perceive a collection of objects we will perceptually group together objects that are physically close to each other. This allows for the grouping together of elements into larger sets, and reduces the need to process a larger number of smaller stimuli.
For this reason, people tend to see clusters of dots on a page instead of a large number of individual dots. The brain groups together the elements instead of processing a large number of smaller stimuli, allowing us to understand and conceptualize information more quickly. Gestalt law of proximity : Because of the law of proximity, people tend to see clusters of dots on a page instead of a large number of individual dots.
This law states that people will perceive similar elements will be perceptually grouped together. This allows us to distinguish between adjacent and overlapping objects based on their visual texture and resemblance. The law of similarity : Because of the law of similarity, people tend to see this as six clusters of black and white dots rather than 36 individual dots.
A visual field can be separated into two distinct regions: the figures prominent objects and the ground the objects that recede into the background.
Many optical illusions play on this perceptual tendency. The figure-ground law : In the Kanizsa triangle illusion, the figure-ground law causes most people to perceive a white triangle in the foreground, which makes the black shapes recede into the background. The law of closure explains that our perception will complete incomplete objects, such as the lines of the IBM logo. While it is made up of just lines, we perceive the three letters. Human and animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information.
A special part of our brain known as the fusiform face area FFA is dedicated to the recognition and organization of people. This module developed in response to our need as humans to recognize and organize people into different categories to help us survive.
We develop perceptual schemas in order to organize impressions of people based on their appearance, social roles, interaction, or other traits; these schemas then influence how we perceive other things in the world.
These schemas are heuristics, or shortcuts that save time and effort on computation. This is the blessing and curse of schemas and heuristics: they are useful for making sense of a complex world, but they can be inaccurate.
We also develop stereotypes to help us make sense of the world. Stereotypes are categories of objects or people that help to simplify and systematize information so the information is easier to be identified, recalled, predicted, and reacted to.
Between stereotypes, objects or people are as different from each other as possible. Within stereotypes, objects or people are as similar to each other as possible. While our tendency to group stimuli together helps us to organize our sensations quickly and efficiently, it can also lead to misguided perceptions.
Stereotypes become dangerous when they no longer reflect reality, or when they attribute certain characteristics to entire groups. They can contribute to bias, discriminatory behavior, and oppression. Interpretation, the final stage of perception, is the subjective process through which we represent and understand stimuli.
In the interpretation stage of perception, we attach meaning to stimuli. Each stimulus or group of stimuli can be interpreted in many different ways. Interpretation refers to the process by which we represent and understand stimuli that affect us.
Our interpretations are subjective and based on personal factors. It is in this final stage of the perception process that individuals most directly display their subjective views of the world around them. Cultural values, needs, beliefs, experiences, expectations, involvement, self-concept, and other personal influences all have tremendous bearing on how we interpret stimuli in our environment. Prior experience plays a major role in the way a person interprets stimuli.
Textbook Solutions MCQ Online Tests. Important Solutions Question Bank Solutions Time Tables. Advertisement Remove all ads. Short Note. How do socio-cultural factors influence our perceptions?
Because the physical environment differs profoundly between different cultural contexts Miyamoto et al. The present study set out to close this empirical gap by examining how different types of stimuli, varying in familiarity, affect cross-cultural differences in context sensitivity in an eye-tracking task. Specifically, we were interested in, first, whether perceptual styles are consistent across stimulus categories and, second, whether the familiarity of the stimuli influences the cross-cultural differences in visual attention.
Families and household sizes are usually small. Parents are occupied in professional jobs and have high levels of formal education. Before children enter school at the age of 6 or 7, they usually attend kindergarten.
The majority of children graduate from school at the age of 18 to 19 and then enter University or start to work. Children from the Nso culture in rural Nsoland in the North West region of Cameroon grow up in large, extended family settings.
Livelihood depends on subsistence-based farming which plays a central role for family alimentation. Nso developmental goals are obedience, conformity, and respect for authority with long-term consequences for developing a cohesive society where members are cooperative, responsible for each other, develop a sense of collective identity and belongingness Yovsi, In Kumbo, children attend preschool from 4 to 6 years before they start primary school.
School attendance is obligatory and regular from preschool to at least the end of primary school grade 6 with about 12 years of age. After that, the majority of children attend at least secondary education and only a small minority continues with high school or university. Given that attentional styles gradually develop during childhood Imada et al. Considering previous findings, we expected that the context sensitivity of participants in both settings would increase with age Imada et al.
Children and adolescents from both cultural contexts participated in an eye-tracking task assessing their spontaneous attention to four different sets of pictures varying in familiarity. As the first set resembles the set that has been used in previous studies with a similar task e. In addition, we used a culture-specific matched set, consisting of culturally adjusted, natural stimuli that have been matched across cultures, and we used a set of simple stimuli.
The standard, culture-specific matched and simple set have been rated by experts from the respective cultural context to back up these assumptions. Example stimuli used in the different sets: A standard set, B non-semantic set, C culture-specific matched set in Germany, D culture-specific matched set in Cameroon, and E simple set. Given the social orientation hypothesis — the assumption that in a cultural context, the social orientation is associated with the dominant cognitive style Varnum et al.
Regarding the differential familiarity hypothesis, we expected that this cross-cultural difference in visual attention should be strongest for the sets of stimuli that are equally familiar for both cultures, namely the culture-specific matched set and the simple set.
The age range was between 4 and 20 years. All participants had normal or corrected to normal visual acuity. In Kumbo, children were recruited by word of mouth. Informed written consent was obtained from parents in both contexts, and children gave informed assent.
For their participation, families in Kumbo received financial compensation of CFA, which was equivalent to 1. The type and amount of compensation have been discussed with local assistants to determine a locally appropriate compensation for the time spent. The gender distribution did not systematically differ between both samples Participants attended one experimental session, and each participant saw all four sets of stimuli. This set consisted of 40 real pictures displaying a focal object animals and vehicles in front of an urban or nature background see Figure 1A.
Pictures were either taken by the authors, obtained from a public domain database 1 or were selected from the set used by Chua et al. Further, 40 non-semantic pictures with abstract objects in front of abstract backgrounds were shown see Figure 1B. We used artificial objects commonly used in experimental psychology greebles, fribbles, geons, and multipart geons, e.
We compiled two sets of 20 real pictures with animals, vehicles, and buildings as focal objects. The participants only saw the set with the stimuli from their respective cultural context. Pictures were matched over the two sets in the sense that they depicted the same kind of object in front of an equally complex background e. Moreover, the position of the salient objects, as well as their size was matched across cultural settings.
Finally, we presented a simple set of 20 pictures with common, everyday objects in front of a simple background e. In order to back up the assumptions concerning the familiarity of the stimuli sets, the pictures of the standard, culture-specific matched and the simple set were rated by experts that were highly familiar with the respective environment.
Thus, we decided to exclude the non-semantic set from the rating. Overall, these findings support the assumptions concerning the familiarity of the stimuli sets described above. Assessments started with either the standard or the culture-specific matched set, with the respective other set being second. Then, participants saw either the non-semantic set or the simple set, with the respective other set being last. The order of the sets was counterbalanced, and pictures were randomized within each set and separated by a blank screen.
The stimulus presentation procedures were implemented in psychophysics toolbox Version 3. The presentation was on a To calibrate the eye-tracker, participants made saccades to a grid of nine fixation dots on the screen, and four dots were used to validate the calibration results. The BeGaze software was used to define areas of interest AOIs around the focal object of each picture to distinguish the focal object from the background.
For each picture, the total duration of all fixations made into the AOI of the object was divided by the duration of all fixations on the picture object and background area within the 5 s of stimulus presentation. As a consequence, pictures that were not fixated at all, were not included in the mean score. Based on the object score for each picture, we then calculated the mean object score for each set separately.
A score of 1 would mean that the participant only looked at the object, while a score of 0 would indicate that a participant only looked at the background. The lower the mean object score of a participant is, the higher is his or her context sensitivity.
Since this trend might lead to an increased object focus, we decided to exclude the five pairs of matched pictures in which the differences in object size between the German and the Cameroonian pictures were largest i. Thus, the final object score for the culture-specific matched set was based on 15 pictures in each cultural context.
To test for the cross-cultural and age differences in attentional style and whether these depend on the familiarity of the stimuli used, the object scores, defined as the relative gaze duration on the focal object, for each set were entered as the dependent variable in separate multiple regression analyses.
Given the fact that moderator effects are generally difficult to detect, we followed the advice of Pedhazur and interpret interactions when they achieve the 0. To determine the simple effects of age, this analysis was followed up by a regression analysis with object score as the dependent and age as the independent variable, separate for the two cultural contexts.
The present study aimed at investigating how the familiarity of stimuli affects cross-cultural differences in context sensitivity expected along the social orientation hypothesis. These results are in line with the social orientation hypothesis that predicts higher context sensitivity in interdependent than in independent cultures Varnum et al.
Taken together, these findings indicate that the cross-cultural differences in context sensitivity are highly sensitive to the stimulus material used. Specifically, if the overall scene is less familiar, more attention is directed to the focal object, which can lead to reversed findings than would be expected based on the cultural orientation of the participants.
When looking at visual stimuli of the type used in this study, namely the standard and the non-semantic stimuli, previous studies have shown that the focal object is fixated first see Chua et al. If the stimulus is unfamiliar, the exploration of the object may take longer and, thus, due to the limited presentation time, less time remains to explore the context.
This might explain why participants look at the object for longer if the stimuli are unfamiliar, as we found for the standard and the non-semantic set in Kumbo. However, this does not explain the findings for the simple set: although the stimuli are familiar in both cultural contexts — according to the expert judgments, somewhat more so for the Kumbo participants — context sensitivity did not differ between cultures. As a consequence, the two effects familiarity and social orientation neutralized each other, leading to similar results on both cultures.
Second, as the background is quite simple in this set e. Possibly, culture-specific patterns of context sensitivity may only come into effect if stimuli, including the context, are sufficiently complex. Based on these data, the potential explanations cannot be further scrutinized, but both suggest that the cross-cultural differences in context sensitivity are highly susceptible to the stimulus material used.
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