Week 2: Seeing and Perception: The world is flat because you’ve never seen it round.

Question 1: What is perception and why is it different from seeing?

The perceptual process allows us to experience the world around us. Take a moment to think of all the things you perceive on a daily basis. At any given moment, you might see familiar objects in your environment, feel the touch of objects and people against your skin, smell the aroma of a home-cooked meal and hear the sound of music playing on your audio car. All of these things help make up our conscious experience and allow us to interact with the people and objects around us.

Firstly, Barry (2005) describes 'perception' as the process where “data are reduced and compressed, and what was once a retinal image becomes … representative map of visual reality. In this way, light is transformed into meaning built from separate, specific functions in the brain.” (p. 51). To further simplify this ideology, our perception is influenced by what we already know (Berger, Blomberg, Fox, Dibb & Hollis, 1977).

Seeing is not the same as perceiving. My own understanding of these two terms is that we may 'see' things the same way, but we may not 'look' (perceive) it the same way. The difference between seeing and perceiving is due to the fact that when we see, we see at what our biological make up had manufactured.  We see images that we have learned, stored in our brains through our lifetime learning process since birth.  We see the image as it is with no interference with feelings or ideas. In contrast, perceiving is the process of you building up feelings and ideas through what you see and even sometimes refract away from the common.

Therefore, to explain how 'perception' and 'seeing' are different: 'seeing' is like the first stage of viewing things. It is where the light emits from an object and the reflection of those lights into your retina, which produces an image in your brain. The process of 'perception' is like the second level of viewing things, you use information that you have previously obtained to impose meaning on a something.

“Perceiving is related to the individual's accumulated experience.” (Martin, 1995)

References:

Barry, A. M. (2005). Perception Theory. In K. Smith, S. Moriarty, G. Barbatsis & K. Kenney (Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods and media (pp. 45-62). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Berger, J., Blomberg, S., Fox, C., Dibb, M., & Hollis, R. (1997). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin Books.

Martin, P. (1995). Visual Communication Images with Messages. United States: Wadsworth Publishing Company.