Why perceptions are important

Your professional image and its effect on future career success cannot be understated. The work you do—and how you do it—contributes to the image others have of you in the workplace. Those others play a role as well. Your managers, colleagues, customers and suppliers all build an image of you as they interpret your work product, communication skills and behaviors in the office. Building a professional image can be the difference between a rapid rise in an organization—or career stagnation.

Your professional image is in your control. To help you, we put together a list of seven tips that will set a strong foundation for building a positive professional image—and ultimately, career success:. Show up on time : Being on-time and managing a consistent schedule is a great way to demonstrate that you are organized, reliable and consistent.

Pick a window of time that you plan to arrive and leave work. Stick to it! If you have an unpredictable schedule it is easy for your co-workers to think you are showing up late, leaving early or seem unreliable. Prepare for meetings. Arrive at meetings ready to work. As mentioned above, you should be on time. This simple step shows your respect for your colleagues and that you are organized.

The shared experiences of people within a given cultural context can have pronounced effects on perception. For example, Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits published the results of a multinational study in which they demonstrated that individuals from Western cultures were more prone to experience certain types of visual illusions than individuals from non-Western cultures, and vice versa.

Figure 2. These perceptual differences were consistent with differences in the types of environmental features experienced on a regular basis by people in a given cultural context. In contrast, people from certain non-Western cultures with an uncarpentered view, such as the Zulu of South Africa, whose villages are made up of round huts arranged in circles, are less susceptible to this illusion Segall et al.

It is not just vision that is affected by cultural factors. Think about a time when you failed to notice something around you because your attention was focused elsewhere.

Skip to main content. Sensation and Perception. Search for:. What is Perception? Learning Objectives Discuss the roles attention, motivation, and sensory adaptation play in perception. Link to Learning See for yourself how inattentional blindness works by watching this selective attention test from Simons and Chabris :.

Link to Learning Read more on inattentional blindness though this link to the Noba Project website. Link to Learning Review the differences between sensation and perception in this CrashCourse Psychology video. Think It Over 1.

Glossary bottom-up processing: system in which perceptions are built from sensory input. Licenses and Attributions. CC licensed content, Original. Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory perceives in order to give meaning to their environment.

However, what one perceives can be substantially different from objective reality. It is the process through which the information from the outside environment is selected, received, organized and interpreted to make it meaningful. This input of meaningful information results in decisions and actions. A number of factors operate to shape and sometimes distort perception. These factors can reside in the perceiver in the object or target being perceived, or in the context of the situation in which the perception is made.

When an individual looks at a target and attempts to interpret what he or she sees, that interpretation is heavily influenced by the personal characteristics of the individual perceiver.

There are some factors that influence the target such as- novelty, motion, sounds, size, background, proximity, similarity, etc. Characteristics of the target being observed can affect what is perceived. Because targets are not looked at in isolation, the relationship of a target to its background also influences perception, as does our tendency to group close things and similar things together.

There are also some situational factors like the time of perceiving others, work settings, social settings, etc. Besides these, there are some other factors like perceptual learning which is based on past experiences or any special training that we get, every one of us learns to emphasize some sensory inputs and to ignore others.

Another factor is the mental set, which refers to preparedness or readiness to receive some sensory input.

Such expectancy keeps the individual prepared with good attention and concentration. The level of knowledge we have may also change the way we perceive his or her behaviors. Learning has a considerable influence on perception.

It creates expectancy in people. The nature of the things which have to be perceived is also an influential factor. By nature we mean, whether the object is visual or auditory, and whether it involves pictures, people or animals. Perception is determined by both physiological and psychological characteristics of the human being whereas sensation is conceived with only the physiological features.

In this overview of perception and the perceptual process, we will learn more about how we go from detecting stimuli in the environment to actually taking action based on that information and it can be organized into our existing structures and patterns, and are then interpreted based on previous experiences. Although the perception is a largely cognitive and psychological process, how we perceive the people and objects around us affects our communication.

Actually perception process is a sequence of steps that begins with the environment and leads to our perception of a stimulus and action in response to the stimulus.

In order to fully understand how the perception process works, we have to follow each of the following steps. The world around us is filled with an infinite number of stimuli that we might attend, but our brains do not have the resources to pay attention to everything. When we attend to one specific thing in our environment — whether it is a smell, a feeling, a sound, or something else entirely — it becomes the attended stimulus.

Selecting is the first part of the perception process, in which we focus our attention on certain incoming sensory information. In selection, we choose stimuli that attract our attention. We focus on the ones that stand out to our senses sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

We take information through all five of our senses, but our perceptual field includes so many stimuli that it is impossible for our brains to process and make sense of it all.

So, as information comes in through our senses, various factors influence what actually continues on through the perception process. Once we have chosen to attend to a stimulus in the environment, the choice sets off a series of reactions in our brain. This neural process starts with the activation of our sensory receptors touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Organizing is the second part of the perception process, in which we sort and categorize information that we perceive based on innate and learned cognitive patterns.

Three ways we sort things into patterns are by using proximity, similarity, and difference Stanley, mo. After we have attended to a stimulus, and our brains have received and organized the information, we interpret it in a way that makes sense using our existing information about the world Interpretation simply means that we take the information that we have sensed and organized and turn it into something that we can categorize.

By putting different stimuli into categories, we can better understand and react to the world around us. Perception of others involves sensing, organizing, and interpreting information about people, and what they say and do. The sensation is a main characteristic of perception as it relates to outside input.

In the perceptual process, firstly the perceiver should select what will be perceived.