Perceptual Theory In Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology deals with the structure and functions of the mind. The biggest question to answer in this field of psychology is how does the mind interpret and organize the knowledge obtained from outside influences. The cognitive process of perception explains how the mind interprets information from the senses to create mental representations of objects and events. Pre-existing schemas contain sensory information that aid how humans make sense of familiar events or objects, significantly influencing the perceptual set. The perceptual set explains how certain factors affect an individual’s perception thus impacting their experience of the world (Crane 41). With the lack of tangible evidence of this cognitive process, researchers can have individuals conduct cognitive tasks relating to perception as way of defining the perceptual process. The perceptual set that occurs when examining ambiguous figures would be past experiences or motivational influences, factors that motivate the individual to see only one way organizing the figure. The ambiguous figure task gives researchers a way to understand the mechanisms of this mental process, perceiving a stimuli and acting in response to the stimuli.

Ambiguous figures can be separated into two different organizations depending on the individual’s perceptual process. The individual may be influenced prior to seeing a figure through priming in order to see one organization of the figure. Priming works to sway the bias perspective of the person by exposing them to either words or pictures loosely related to the object or figure. In the study conducted by Goolkasian and Woodberry (2010), the effect of visual and verbal primes on interpretation of ambiguous figures was investigated. ...

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... the researchers debriefed them of what the researchers was studying, the participant’s role in the research, and that results of experiment would be e-mailed. Participants were asked preserve the validity of experiment by not discussing it outside of class.

15. Steps 6-13 were repeated in the other condition with the other group.

16. The questionnaires were analyzed and conclusions were drawn from the results.

Results – Descriptive

The researchers collected nominal data from the experiment. Because nominal data was collected, the mode was chosen as the measure of central tendency. From Table 1 and Figure 1, the results suggest that swan was the most frequently perceived category in both verbal and visual conditions (12 in verbal and 10 in visual). An appropriate measure of dispersion could not be used because the data collected was nominal.

Table 1

Condition Mode