Perception

Definition 1:

In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses."

Definition 2:

Perception is the process by which organisms interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world. Sensation usually refers to the immediate, relatively unprocessed result of stimulation of sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or skin. Perception, on the other hand, better describes one's ultimate experience of the world and typically involves further processing of sensory input. In practice, sensation and perception are virtually impossible to separate, because they are part of one continuous process.



My Interpretation:

I would describe perception as the ability to receive information and create my own view of that information through my personal opinions. There are many different theories for analysing perception, whether it be psychological or physical.

Below are a couple of adverts that attract different senses:

Sound:

Taste:

Smell:

Touch:

Sight:

A physical way of deconstructing perception is to look at the perceptual process model which describes how our senses receive stimuli. Marketeers use different tools to appeal to these senses depending on the product or service they are trying to sell. For example, when trying to sweets to children, the design of the packet will have to appeal to sweets, either through colours or images. Strawberry flavoured sweets may have images of the fruit on the packet, chocolate containing nuts may have nuts on.

(Solomon et al, 2010, p119)

For example, a picture that I found relating to a theory of perception will show two different images:

http://www.mscareergirl.com/2010/08/10/perception-is-reality/

One persons perception of this image may be different to someone else's, you will either see a vase or two faces. Neither perception is wrong however, it does show that not everyone thinks along the same lines, and whilst one theory is perfectly acceptable for one person, to another it might have a completely different meaning. Brassington (2007) agreed with this and stated that when a stimuli is interpreted by our brain, no two people will have the same reaction. The Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) model looks into why we all perceive stimuli in different ways, either through culture and values or personality and traits, debatably even gender. Many personality tests are now available on the internet, linking personality traits together to determine charateristics which marketers can use to target their products. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes3.asp
The video below also looks at perception, and how information deemed not to be relevant is filtered by our brain.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8301897598175512211

Gestalt laws of perceptual organisation describes how our brain will 'fill in the blanks' if some of the information is missing. 'Filling in the blanks' varies from person to person, depending on personality, and this links to the NLP model.