DEFINITION OF PERCEPTION ~ MBA

What Is Perception And How Does It Occur?

What is the definition of perception? Think of it as the process of becoming aware of the world around you through your senses.

Your senses play a critical role in perception and behavior. They not only allow you to perceive your environment, they also enable you to act in response to it.

Sensation and perception psychology is one of the oldest fields of study in social psychology. Below I'm going to take you through the process we go through to become aware of anything in our environments.

The Definition Of Perception: The Sensing Process

Perception happens in one of five ways:
You see something with your eyes

Smell something with your nose

Hear something with your ears

Feel something with your skin

Taste something on your tongue

Because there is an overabundance of stimulation hitting your senses in every moment, most sensations will be filtered out. This is why only a fraction of your surrounding environment will ever reach your conscious awareness.

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.
Thus, perception in humans describes the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percepts suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual process; theories of perceiving then can be developed on the basis of these inferences. Because the perceptual process is not itself public or directly observable (except to the perceiver himself, whose percepts are given directly in experience), the validity of perceptual theories can be checked only indirectly