Psychology - Factors Affecting Perception

• Perceptual set

  Our brains are thought to be biased in the way they perceive information as sensory information is detected, we focus on some bits of information and ignore all the parts we have a group or a set of expectations based on previous experience that we use to make inferences altering our perception
• Factors influencing perceptual set

  • Culture
  • Motivation
  • Emotion
  • Expectation
• Culture

  Influences the development of people through socialization, we learn norms and values and we tend to share the same mental schemas as other people in our society, this means people with different cultures will perceive the world differently
• Cultural differences in perception

  • Black South Africans were more likely to say the man was hunting the elephant, white Westerners said the antelope
• Motivation


  Can influence perceptual set, if we want an object it will be highlighted in some way in our perception, motivation might be to satisfy basic needs like hunger or thirst or because the object gives us status
• Gilchrist and Nezberg study on motivation and perception

  Assigned participants to be food deprived or not, showed images of food, found food deprived participants adjusted images to be brighter
• Gilchrist and Nezberg concluded that motivation such as the motivation to eat does change a person's perceptual set, making food appear brighter to hungry people
• Emotion

  Can influence how we perceive the world and objects in it, for example you might perceive someone else's body language as aggressive if you're already in a bad mood or a movie as particularly sad if you're depressed
• Expectation

  Our perception is based on previous experience, we'll tend to focus on what matches our expectations and then filter out what we're not expected
• Bruner and Minturn study on expectation and perception

  Participants were primed with either numbers or letters, then shown an ambiguous stimulus (a broken B), found participants were more likely to interpret it as a 13 after number priming and a B after letter priming
• Bruner and Minturn concluded that participants' expectations influenced their perceptual set, changing how they interpreted the ambiguous stimulus