Bruner and Minturn

• why the study is important

  • Carefully controlled and counterbalanced, so it could be replicated, increasing the reliability of these findings
  • Showed the importance of human experience and context in perception, challenging the idea that perceptual rules always work the same way (as stated by Gibson)
  • Confirmed how recognition can be influenced by expectation, providing support for Gregory's explanation of how we interpret information
• Participants

  • Not very many
  • All volunteers, so their behaviour might not have been representative as they were keen and enthusiastic participants
  • Might have guessed the purpose of the study, which could have affected the results
• Study

  • High internal validity as Bruner and Minturn controlled possible extraneous variables
  • Standardised procedures making the study replicable
• Sample

  • Volunteer students, so the findings may not be generalisable to the wider population
  • Perception changes as a person ages or that people who volunteer have other differences that influence their perception
• Task

  • Lacks mundane realism, as the task isn't how perception is experienced in real life as there are very few truly ambiguous situations
• Aim

  To investigate if expectation of a stimulus influences a persons perceptual set
• method

  Participants (student volunteers) were told they were taking part in a study on recognising numbers and letters. Numbers or letters were flashed on a screen quickly and participants had to write down what they had seen.

  There was a test stimulus a "broken B" that could be interpreted as a B or a 13.

  Participants were either flashed a series of letters or numbers before the "broken B"
• Results

  When participants were primed with a sequence of numbers they were much more likely to write 13, when they were primed with a sequence of letters they were much more likely to write B.
• Conclusions

  The participants expectation surrounding the stimulus figure altered how they interpreted it, their perceptual set had been influenced.