This semester studying Perception along side of Cognitive Psycology, has given me a much broader understanding of higher functions in the human brain and why I perceive situations the way that I do. The concept that perception is based on our environment and the information that we take from it and is colored by all of our experiences, has given me a greater look into why we all react to the world in the ways that we do.
To ensure survival and navigation trough our world, we use a combination of bottom-up processing and top-down processing, to encode information from our environment. many of our disappointments are based on constructive perception theories of expectations. Expecting people to behave the way that I think they should, has lead to many let downs in my life. The episodic memories of past experience have also kept me from taking chances and trying something new.
From the Goldstein text I learned about the "Gestault Laws", which are innate principle of organization that we apply to our world to enable us to understand our environment. By using Top-down processing to decipher our world, we can actually change the structure of our brains, therefore altering our perception of the world around us. This gives me hope for a brighter future through changing my perception.
Great courses! I had a cognitive Psychology class Years ago, and now our perception class. I'm enjoying this class now and there are many solid theories that we are going through. I like your mention of the "Gestalt Laws" Which I read about years ago, the interesting principle behind these laws also involve how we make up for information that may not be fully available but yet we encode the information to process. this is called also called prägnanz and gives so much to this field!
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