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Perception

Perception

Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...

Factors Affecting Perception

Factors Affecting Perception

Perception is influenced by perceptual set, context, motivation, and emotion. Perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, refers to the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, influenced by previous experiences and expectations. This phenomenon affects the interpretation of stimuli, creating a set of mental tendencies and assumptions that impact sensory perceptions of sound, taste, touch, and sight.
An illustrative example of a perceptual set is the scenario where an airline pilot told...

Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect

While variables are sometimes correlated because one does cause the other, it could also be that some other factor, a confounding variable, is actually causing the systematic movement in our variables of interest. For instance, as sales in ice cream increase, so does the overall rate of crime. Is it possible that indulging in your favorite flavor of ice cream could send you on a crime spree? Or, after committing crime do you think you might decide to treat yourself to a cone?

Criteria for Causality: Bradford Hill Criteria - II

Criteria for Causality: Bradford Hill Criteria - II

The Bradford Hill criteria serve as guidelines for establishing causative links in epidemiological research. Beyond Strength, Consistency, Specificity, and Temporality, key criteria also include Biological Gradient, Plausibility, Coherence, Experiment, and Analogy. These principles assist scientists in assessing the likelihood of causation in complex biological contexts. Below is a summary of these concepts:

Gestalt Principles of Perception

Gestalt Principles of Perception

Gestalt principles provide a framework for understanding how humans perceive objects as unified wholes within their context. These principles are essential in explaining the cognitive processes that make sense of complex visual stimuli by organizing them into coherent groups. One fundamental principle is proximity, which posits that objects located close to each other are perceived as a collective group. For instance, when dots are positioned near one another, the visual system interprets them...

Criteria for Causality: Bradford Hill Criteria - I

Criteria for Causality: Bradford Hill Criteria - I

The Bradford Hill criteria are a group of principles that provide a framework to determine a causal relationship between a specific factor and a disease. There are nine criteria that are pivotal in assessing causality in epidemiological studies. Here's a closer look at Strength, Consistency, Specificity, and Temporality criteria with definitions and examples:

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 7, 2026

Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning

Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning

Published on: November 2, 2012

Causation From Perception.

¹Psychology Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science

|July 11, 2015

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

People do not inherently perceive causality. Instead, our brains use stored memories of events, like pushing, to interpret perceived actions, challenging Albert Michotte's original causality perception theory.

Keywords:

Michotte causal cognition causality perception of causality

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Published on: July 26, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Philosophy of Mind
Perception Science

Background:

Albert Michotte's research suggested people directly perceive causality in simple events.
This theory posits that causality is a direct perceptual experience.
An alternative view suggests causality is inferred from memory representations.

Purpose of the Study:

To evaluate Albert Michotte's hypothesis on perceived causality.
To compare Michotte's theory with the memory-based interpretation of causality.
To determine if empirical evidence favors direct perception or memory-based inference.

Main Methods:

Review of infant and animal studies.
Analysis of cognitive and neuropsychological dissociation experiments.
Examination of context effects and individual differences in perception studies.

Main Results:

Existing research does not provide evidence favoring Michotte's direct perception theory.
Data from various paradigms align better with a memory-based interpretation of causality.
No compelling reason found to prefer the hypothesis that causality is perceived directly.

Conclusions:

The perception of causality may not be a direct perceptual experience.
Causality recognition appears to rely on retrieving and applying stored event representations from long-term memory.
The findings challenge the traditional view of perceived causality and support an inferential account.