An Attempt at Thinking

As an organized complex, perception and cognition, together depend on other factors like:

i)Attention , about which we can say that in order to perceive and cognate an event it must be focused upon or noticed. Moreover, attention itself is selective – and selection presupposes interpretation – so that attending to one stimulus tends to inhibit or suppress the processing of others,

ii)Constancy , in that the perceptual world tends to remain the same despite rather drastic alterations in the conditions of observation. For example, a book seen from an angle is still perceived as rectangular although the retinal image is distinctly trapezoidal,

iii)Motivation , as an intervening process or an internal state of an organism that impels or drives it to action. For example hungry people perceive food objects in ambiguous stimuli, poor children overestimate the size of coins more than those from well-to-do families,

iv)Organization, as a characteristic of any complex system that reflects the degree to which its several, structurally distinguishable parts are functionally coordinated and interrelated,

v)Set, the cognitive and/or emotional stance that is taken toward a stimulus array strongly affects what will be perceived,

vi)Learning, and there are two issues here: one concerns the question of how much perception is innate and how much acquired from experience, the other concerns the question of how learning can function to modify perception,

vii)Illusion, – there are many circumstances in which what is perceived cannot be easily predicted from an analysis of the physical-stimulus array,

viii)Distortion and Hallucination – it can be said that hallucinations can be produced by a variety of causes including drugs, lack of sleep, emotional stress, etc., and that strong emotional feelings and ideology can distort perceptions rather dramatically – in speaking about ideology, both Sartre and Barthes demonstrate how “”every individual text, by its institutionalized signals, necessarily selects a particular readership for itself and thereby symbolically endorses the inevitable blood guilt of that particular group or class”” (Jameson, F., Architecture and the Critique of Ideology, p.61, (12)),

ix)Cultural determination – for example, the movie experiment carried out in ten different countries, experiment in which the subjects were shown a short silent film which they then had to describe to another person, they were told, had not seen the film, demonstrates that the “”subjects organized and altered the actual contents of the movie in many ways as they attempted to articulate what they had seen”” (pp.66-67, (2)).