Perceptual Set: effects of short-term past experience on the interpretation of an ambiguous image.

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Abstract: This experiment tested whether humans are influenced by expectations of what they will see on how they interpret what they see. This was tested by showing four images which started out as an image of a man or woman and slowly turned into an ambiguous image in which a man or woman could be perceived. The hypothesis was supported. Intro: Perceptual set refers to the mental predisposition to perceive a stimulus as one thing rather than another. There are two forms of perceptual set; that of context and past experience. This experiment tested past experience perceptual set. It tested at what rate humans are influenced by their memory or expectations of what a stimulus is on how they perceive an ambiguous image (a stimulus which can be perceived as two different images). This would be due to the new stimulus being merged with a mental image created by past experiences. Alampay and Bugelski (as cited by Chandler, 1961) conducted a famous experiment which showed the effects of perceptual set. Participants were shown an ambiguous image of a rat/face after having been shown a set of images depicting faces or a set of images depicting animals. The results showed that when shown images of animals 100% of the participants perceived the stimulus as a rat compared to 19% of the control group perceiving rats without prior visual stimulus. Another experiment conducted by Leeper (as cited by Chandler, 1935) used a famous ambiguous image which showed both an old woman and a young woman. Leeper morphed the image to be biased towards showing mainly the young woman or mainly the old woman. When participants were shown one of the biased images and then asked what they saw in the ambiguous image over 90% perceived the same woman as had been shown in their biased image. Both of these experiments show that past experience has a strong influence on what we perceive a stimulus

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