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Psychology of Communication: perception
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Psychology of Communication: perception
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As you will have seen if you've looked through the previous sections, there are some functions of perception which may be hard-wired: either they are innate or the brain is 'programmed' to develop those functions as the infant develops. That supposition needs to be treated with caution, though, because a new-born baby is not likely to be much good at reporting what it sees, so there's not a lot to go on.
If you have looked at the second section on perception, you will have seen that some perception is clearly dependent on our experience of our culture. Psychologists have developed the idea of a perceptual set in an attempt to account for such factors in perception. The notion of a set includes a whole range of motivational, emotional, social and cultural factors.
The idea is that such factors in a set have the following effects:
Quite a good example of this is where subjects in an experiment by Minturn and Bruner were given sequences of either letters or numbers to look at, either ABCDEF or 12345678. When presented with an ambiguous figure, subjects were inclined to interpret it according to the expectations of their 'set'. Thus, those who saw numbers interpreted 
and 
as '13 and '18', while those who saw letters interpreted them as 'B' and 'IB'.
Click here 
to see
another example of directed perception.
A similar experiment was conducted by Siipola . He gave a series of words and letters to one group so that they came to expect animal words; to a second group he gave a series leading them to expect nautical terms. When 'sael' was presented to them in a tachistoscope (a device for displaying words or symbols for very brief periods of time), the first group read it as 'seal', the second group as 'sail'. The same happened with skeleton words like 'oat' which they were asked to fill out. One group produced 'goat', the other 'boat' and so on. They were not able to explain why they had done so. This suggests the very powerful influence of such unconscious factors.
There have been numerous experiments on the link between food deprivation and perception. Subjects are deprived of food and water. When shown pictures of food and drink, they perceived them as having enhanced brightness. After they were allowed to eat and drink, the apparent brightness subsided.
It has been demonstrated as well that children from poor homes tend to see coins as bigger than those from wealthy homes.
Perceptual defence is termed by Malim a kind of 'anti-set'. He reports the experiment by Worthington in which subjects were shown two spots of light of equal brightness. In each spot there was a word which was too dim to be consciously perceived. Those words with the higher emotional rating were consistently perceived as dimmer. (Malim (1994) p.62).
This suggests that receivers may set up a kind of perceptual defence against taboo words or taboo actions. One might expect that taboo words would be more salient, more quickly responded to, but there is some suggestion that the opposite is the case. So, if you intend to make your message stand out by using such words, or images of taboo behaviour, you might in fact achieve the opposite
Perceptual sensitisation is demonstrated in another study which shows the relationship between emotion and perception conducted by Lazarus and McCleary. Subjects were given an electric shock when presented with certain nonsense syllables and their anxiety was measured. Later, subjects were exposed to those and other syllables so fast that they could not consciously perceive them. It was clear that the syllables to which they had been sensitised did raise their anxiety level, even though they could not consciously distinguish them from any others.
You may be able to achieve something of this sort in your practical work, establishing links between, say, rewards of some kind and certain words or images.
Eriksen showed that aggressive subjects were quicker to perceive pictures showing aggressive behaviour than were the low-aggression control subjects.
Subjects who were rated as having a strong desire for 'success and mastery' perceived words related to success at a lower level of illumination than the control subjects (quoted in Dobson et al. (1981) pp.67-70)
Pettigrew et al showed how cultural set affects perception. Different racial groups of South Africans were presented with a series of different pictures to each eye. Pictures of a member of one race were shown to one eye and another to the other. Afrikaners saw all the pictures as either European or African. They did not differentiate 'coloured' or 'mixed-race' people from those of African origin. This suggests that their racial prejudice affected their perception. (Malim (1994)p.64)
This is a factor you will certainly need to take into account in your practical work. How does the audience's culture\subculture affect their perception of your message? How does it affect their perception of you and how does that affect their perception of your message?
The notion of perceptual sets is something which must clearly be of great importance to your practical work. We have been looking here mainly at visual perception, though the key point applies to any for of perception: perception is largely an active process of making sense. The sense which is made by your audience members will not necessarily be that which you intend, in part because of the differences in their motivation, personality, emotional state, expectations, culture, needs and so on. That's why you need to know as much about your audience as you can find out. As you develop your practical work, you need to keep going back to your audience and testing your ideas on them.
It may not be important for you to encourage your audience to complete words or recognise shapes in a certain way, but, if your project is intended to persuade in some way, then it could certainly be important for you to ensure that you set up the right expectations in your audience so that your conclusions are appropriately perceived.
Attitudes
Learning
Motivation
Personality
Selective attention
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