How Doe We Organise Sensation Into Visual Perception?

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How do we organise our visual sensations into perception? Sensation and perception a two terms that both relate to how one experiences and understands the environment they are in. Despite being related (and often confused), they have very different meanings. Sensation can be defined as the process in which information is taken from the outside world through our sensory organs into our brains. This occurs through the five different senses – touch, hearing, taste, smell and sight. Perception is how this sensory information is processed, organised and interpreted within our brains. Although all of the senses are used to give us explanation of the world around us, it is human vision that is most frequently studied, as it seen as the sense most used in everyday life. In order to understand how the brain perceives the information coming from our eyes, psychologists have developed a number of visual perception principles. These can be put into three main categories; Gestalt principles, depth principles and visual consistencies. All three of these principles are seen as rules that the brain follows in order to distinguish the sensory information it is given. The first principle used to organise our visual sensation into perception are the Gestalt principles. Gestalt principles can be simply as principles that involve the brain perceiving an object as a whole, rather than the parts it is made up of. These principles are often explained with the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. First discovered by psychologists in the early 1900s, there are eight principles that make up the Gestalt theory, each relating to the brains ability to interpret sensations as whole beings. The principles are Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Continuity, Common-Fate, Good Continuation (also known as Good Gestalt), Past Experience and Figure Ground Articulation, however the Past
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