UNDERSTANDING THE

PERCEPTUAL PROCESS
A Designer’s perspective
 Perception and sensation
• What is Sensation?
• What is perception?
 Sensation
• Refers to the immediate, relatively
unprocessed result of stimulation of
sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, nose,
tongue, or skin.
 Perception
• A process by which organisms interpret
and organize sensation to produce a
meaningful experience of the world.
• Better describes one’s ultimate experience
of the world and typically involves further
processing of sensory input.
 Perception
• In practice, sensation and perception are
virtually impossible to separate, because
they are part of one continuous process.
 How do we perceive?
• Organizing raw sensory stimuli into
meaningful experiences involves
cognition, a set of mental activities that
includes thinking, knowing, and
remembering.
• Knowledge + experience
 O lny srmat poelpe can raed
tihs.

I couldn’t blveiee taht I cluod

aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was
rdanieg.
The
phaonmneal pweor of the
hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a
rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy,
The Psychology of Seeing

 Seeing is a ‘meaning’ searching processes.

 Perception is Relative
 Seeing is believing and believing is seeing otherwise seeing is
deceiving.
The Psychology of Seeing

 Seeing involves simplification and categorization of information

 How do we perceive?
• Figure and ground
• Gestalt laws of grouping
Figure and Ground
 Figure and Ground
• What we visually attend to at any time is
called figure, and it is always against some
kind of background.
• Not only does perception involve
organization and grouping, it also involves
distinguishing an object from its
surroundings.
 Figure and Ground
Few important observation about figure and
ground

• Figure and ground cannot be seen

simultaneously, but can be seen sequentially.

• Even though the figure and ground are in the

same physical plane, the figure often appears
nearer to the observer.

• Figure is seen as having contour; ground is not.

 Figure and Ground
• The whole is different from the sum of its parts.
• The whole is not determined solely by its parts.
 Gestalt laws of grouping
• Proximity
• Similarity
• Continuity
• Closure
• Common Fate
• Simplicity
 Proximity
• The closer objects are to one another, the
more likely we are to mentally group them
together
 Similarity
• The law of similarity leads us to link
together parts of the visual field that are
similar in color, lightness, texture, shape,
or any other quality.

rows of objects or
columns of
objects?
 Continuity
• The law of continuity leads us to see a line
as continuing in a particular direction,
rather than making an abrupt turn.
 Closure
• According to the law of closure, we prefer
complete forms to incomplete forms.
 Common Fate
• The law of common fate leads us to group
together objects that move in the same
direction.
• Because of this principle, we often see
flocks of birds or schools of fish as one
unit.
Common Fate
 Simplicity
• This general notion, encompasses all
other Gestalt laws.
• This law states that people intuitively
prefer the simplest, most stable of possible
organizations.
 Simplicity
• three overlapping disks?
• one whole disk and two partial disks with
slices cut out of their right sides?
• a top view of three-dimensional, cylindrical
objects?
 THE ROLE OF CONTEXT
• The context in which an object appears
influences our perception of it.
• Visual experience is useful because it
creates memories of past stimuli that can
later serve as a context for perceiving new
stimuli.
THE ROLE OF CONTEXT

Rat?

Man?
 THE ROLE OF CONTEXT
• Although context is useful most of the
time, on some rare occasions context can
lead you to misperceive a stimulus.

Which green circle is

bigger?
 VISUAL ILLUSIONS
• Illusion, a mistake in the perception of a
sensory experience.
• A visual illusion occurs when our perceptual
experience of a stimulus is substantially
different from the actual stimulus we are
viewing.
• Errors in perception are only considered
illusions if they are experienced by a large
number of people.
 ILLUSIONS OF LENGTH
• Which line is longer
 ILLUSIONS OF SHAPE
• What shape do you see?
ILLUSIONS OF PERSPECTIVE
• Which cat is bigger?
 ILLUSORY CONTOURS
• Illusory contours are edges, sides, or lines
that we perceive but that do not actually
exist.
IMPOSSIBLE FIGURES
 REVERSIBLE FIGURES
• Reversible figures are not true illusions,
because no false perception occurs.