Principles Of Visual Perception

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USING MULLER LYER TO INVESTIGATE PRINCIPLES OF VISUAL PERCEPTION Sensation is the detection or awareness of the presence of a stimulus and perception is the mental process of organising and interpreting this sensory information into meaningful objects and events. The normal perceptual principles can be classified into three broad categories which include Gestalt principles, depth principles and perceptual constancies. Gestalt principles refer to ways in which we organise elements in our visual field by grouping them into perception of whole, complete form in simplest possible way. These principles include closure, similarity, proximity and figure/ground. Depth principles are depth cues that is information from environment (external cues) or from within body (internal cues) that help us to perceive how far away objects are. These include binocular depth cues, monocular depth cues and pictorial depth cues. Visual constancy is the tendency to perceive a visual stimulus as remaining stable despite changes that occur to retina. Aspects include size, shape, brightness and orientation. Muller-Lyer illusion is the visual illusion in which one of two lines in equal length, each which has opposite shaped ends, is incorrectly perceived as being longer than the other. Theories of visual perception that explain illusion include the perceptual compromise theory. Ross Day, an Australian psychologist believes that the Muller-Lyer illusion occurs because certain figures provide visual cues that give us conflicting information. We deal with this by making a perceptual compromise. We compromise by making a ‘middle ground’ interpretation (day 1989 cited in Grivas). We apply gestalt principle of closure to fill the lines between the tips of both figures and these imaginary lines are different (longer or shorter) to the central lines. Gregory (1963) argued that many
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