SESSION 2 – PERCEPTION
Program:
1. Senses and perception
2. Does reality exist?
3. The effects of context
4. Multi-sensory perception
5. “Nudges” – the way we use social psychology
A) Senses and perception:
To perceive:
Perceiving the world, we live in is a necessary condition to live. Hearing, vision, touch
constitute the entrance door to our world.
Perception is in fact made possible through our senses, which transmit the information of
the world to our brain.
Touch Touch allows us to get in contact with other objects, but also with hot and cold.
Smell When we smell something, we feel both its smell (ortho-nasal olfaction) and its
flavour, which is the smell produced by food when we get it into our mouth (retro-nasal
olfaction).
Taste The tongue is the principal organ of our tasting system: small receptors of different
size and shape transmit different types of taste to the brain.
Hearing Through the hearing we translate the “vibrations” in the environment into
sounds.
Vision Vision, through our eyes, translate the light into images (= world’s
representations).
Perception: definition:
Perception is the cognitive process of encoding, treatment, and functional reconstruction of
the sensory information.
The five senses represent the entrance door of the information of the outside world. Our
eyes do not work as a simple camera that transport outside images into our brain.
In the past, people believed that everything that exists in the world is seen as it is. It was the
approach called “naïf realism”.
B) Does reality exist?
Program:
1. Senses and perception
2. Does reality exist?
3. The effects of context
4. Multi-sensory perception
5. “Nudges” – the way we use social psychology
A) Senses and perception:
To perceive:
Perceiving the world, we live in is a necessary condition to live. Hearing, vision, touch
constitute the entrance door to our world.
Perception is in fact made possible through our senses, which transmit the information of
the world to our brain.
Touch Touch allows us to get in contact with other objects, but also with hot and cold.
Smell When we smell something, we feel both its smell (ortho-nasal olfaction) and its
flavour, which is the smell produced by food when we get it into our mouth (retro-nasal
olfaction).
Taste The tongue is the principal organ of our tasting system: small receptors of different
size and shape transmit different types of taste to the brain.
Hearing Through the hearing we translate the “vibrations” in the environment into
sounds.
Vision Vision, through our eyes, translate the light into images (= world’s
representations).
Perception: definition:
Perception is the cognitive process of encoding, treatment, and functional reconstruction of
the sensory information.
The five senses represent the entrance door of the information of the outside world. Our
eyes do not work as a simple camera that transport outside images into our brain.
In the past, people believed that everything that exists in the world is seen as it is. It was the
approach called “naïf realism”.
B) Does reality exist?
