Perception

Abstract

We take it for granted that we can recognise the things in our environment, like the words on this page or a person across the room. But how do we receive information from our senses and then recognise people and objects, to interact with the world around us? The focus of this chapter is on visual perception. The chapter covers the distinction between bottom-up and top-down perception, and theories which follow this distinction. It then considers the brain systems involved in perception, the basic perceptual processes of vision and then theories of object recognition and face processing. The chapter then discusses perception for action, which describes the processes by which perception allows us to control the movements we make to interact with our environment. The chapter then ends with a summary of perception in other domains; auditory, haptic, olfactory and gustatory perception. The chapter also considers additional topics, such as the similarities and differences between object and face recognition and considers evidence from a range of sources.