Chapter 2 Perception

What is perception?

We often heard people saying "do not judge a book by its cover".

To be more precise it is the first impression others give and vice versa.

There are three stages in perception which are :

1. Sensory stimulation occurs
2. Sensory stimulation is organized
3. Sensory stimulation is interpreted-evaluated

There are two principles in the second stage :

• Proximity Principle

• Closure principle

During the lecture, Mr Anwari showed a few pictures for us to perceived and each picture can be perceived in few ways. Below are some of the images showed

Some of us perceived it as a woman and some perceived it as a man playing a saxophone.



Some of us see a lady but some may see an old lady. Majority of the people see the lady first.
The old lady is harder to perceive.



Furthermore, we also learnt about the processes influencing perception. The processes are :

• Implicit personality theory
• The self-fulfilling prophecy
• Perceptual accentuation
• Primacy-Recency
• Consistency
• Stereotyping
• Attribution

In every chapter, the lecturer will conduct an activity. For this chapter we were required to be in our group to discuss about critical perception. We need to find out how to make perceptions more accurate.

In general, critical perceptions help in making perception more accurate.

There are general strategies and specific strategies.