What do you mean by the term Perception ?

Perception is one of the many cognitive processes that help us acquire information from the environment. The environment consisting of various objects and events always excite us in some forms by creating its initial impression on our sense organs. Our first interaction with the environment begins when an external stimulus is sensed, attended to, and perceived. It is through these primary and basic mechanisms, we make sense of what happens in the world around us. We thus experience perception as one of the first psychological processes on which other higher psychological processes such as learning, thinking, memory, problem-solving etc. are based.

From biological bases of behavior, we know that we receive information from our environment through the sense organs. The information so received is transmitted to the brain for processing. Receiving information from the environment by any of the sense organs is called sensation.

The sensation is the initial contact between the organism and the physical environment. The stimuli in the environment emit physical energy, such as light, sound, and heat. The sense organs detect this energy, and transform it into a code that can be transmitted to the brain. But sensation alone is not enough to gather relevant experiences about a particular object or event. It is a simple mechanical process of registering the environmental input, which is then carried to our central nervous system for processing. The information must be organized and interpreted; otherwise, they would be of no use to us. The process through which we organize our sensations to meaningfully interpret them, and thereby form a mental representation of our world is called perception. Perception is a complex mental process and is not mechanical in nature like sensation. It is not simply a passive process of decoding sensory information; it is a dynamic process based on the foundation of sensation. In our everyday life, the two processes of sensation and perception are practically inseparable.

While looking at a table, we do not see all its sides. Moreover, if we look at the table from different angles, the pictures of the table formed on the retina of our eyes would be different every time. But, the table looks the same to us irrespective of our differing angles of vision. The shape, size, and the color of the table do not change. The period for sensation begins with the sensory impression of the table received through the eyes and ends as the information reaches the occipital lobe. Sensation is a simple and mechanical process, while perception primarily consists of understanding all information about the table in the context of our earlier experiences. Perception is an integrated dynamic process because we just do not perceive the exact replica of our sensation. It is something more than our sensation provides us. In the past, we had seen tables of different shapes, sizes, and colors. We had stored the images (mental pictures) of tables in our brain. Now, with the help of those images we perceive the characteristic features of the table.