Question

please 4,5
4.Why do we perceive the size, shape, and brightness of objects as constant despite changes in sensory input?
5.Provide an example of perceptual set and explain how it influences perceptual experiences. Also, in your opinion, how does perceptual set influence one’s beliefs about extrasensory perception (ESP)?

Answer 1

Our brain has an innate tendency to maintain a consistent picture of the world and do away with the need to constantly reinterpret the real-world attributes, even though size, shape and brightness of objects are constantly changing as we move in the world. This is what contributes to the human tendency of constancy. Further, our brain’s functioning extends to more than just receiving sensory inputs; it reconciles such inputs with our understanding of the properties/dynamics of our past experiences/encounters with the real-world attributes. For example, though a white sheet of paper may appear to be of a different shade when viewed in a dark room, we may still perceive it as white, due to our knowledge of it being white and our past encounters with viewing it as white in the daylight.

As we know, perceptual set refers to the various factors such as motivation, expectation, emotion, culture, etc, that influence perception/perceptual experiences or predispose us to perceiving things in a certain way. Such a set may have both positive and negative effects on our perceptual experiences, that is, we may either be able to organize and filter information accurately and as they are, or see and hear things that may be a stark contrast from reality. For example, there is an increased awareness of specific bodily features in individuals with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). This may be attributed to abnormalities in visual information processing. Individuals with BDD have a propensity to engage in local rather than global processing of their bodies, as opposed to those with healthy body images, who process globally rather than locally.

In my opinion, our experiences of sensations and the interaction of those with our physical brains result in one’s beliefs about extrasensory perception (ESP)-related phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. It is this that predisposes some to be primed to hear, see, feel or taste certain things and such perception may be more easily recognized by and available to them. Further, our pre-existing schemas formed through experience with familiar information allow us to interpret unfamiliar/ambiguous information such as paranormal content. Therefore, the underlying sensory and perceptual mechanisms may be the same for all individuals as explained above, but it is one’s unique psychological traits makes them more likely to attribute normal experiences to paranormal causation than others. The brain, however, is capable of perceiving without sensory input, according to skeptics, which requires further testing in controlled environments, in order to prove.