tb2: perception, esp

Meriwether Lewis Expedition: Lewis, startled by a charging grizzly bear, perceived other animals as threats after the encounter, reflecting how fear can alter perception.
Amadou Diallo Incident: Police mistook Diallo's wallet for a gun, showcasing how prior experiences (this time of police) influenced perception and resulted in tragic outcomes.

Plato's Principle: Our perception is a combination of sensory information (bottom-up processing) and cognitive interpretation (top-down processing).
We construct our reality through sensory experience and the brain's interpretation, influenced by previous experiences and cultural expectations.

Definition: The focusing of conscious awareness on a specific stimulus; exemplified by the cocktail party effect.
Necker Cube: Demonstrates how selective attention can create multiple interpretations from the same stimulus; one is consciously aware of only one aspect of perception at a moment.
Information Processing: Our senses receive about 11 million bits of information per second, but only about 40 bits are processed consciously.

Inattentional Blindness: The phenomenon where we fail to see visible objects when focusing attention elsewhere, demonstrated by experiments where participants overlooked a gorilla in a basketball passing video.
Change Blindness: A form of inattentional blindness where significant changes in a visual scene go unnoticed while attention is directed elsewhere.
Choice Blindness: Participants frequently fail to notice when their choices are switched, even explaining why they prefer a choice they did not actually make.

Definition: A mental predisposition to perceive stimuli in a certain way based on past experiences and expectations.
Influences on Perception: Example of viewing a drawing can lead to different interpretations (e.g., a saxophonist vs. a woman's face) based on prior exposure to either interpretation.
Cultural Assumptions: Perception is also shaped by cultural contexts which can influence interpretations of identical stimuli.

How Context Influences Perception: The same word heard in different contexts will lead to different interpretations (e.g., "eel is on the wagon" vs. "eel is on the orange").
Emotional Context Influence: The mood can affect how events are perceived, such as a neutral expression being interpreted as sad or happy depending on the shown context.

Perceptual Adaptation: Humans adjust to altered visual fields, such as shifting visual input using goggles; individuals learn to navigate in distorted visual environments over time.
Restored Vision Studies: Studies of people recovering vision demonstrate that visual perception involves both innate structures and learned experiences.

Definition: ESP is the controversial claim that perception can occur without sensory input; includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.
Skepticism in Psychology: Most psychologists remain skeptical due to lack of reproducible evidence under controlled conditions.

Claims of psychics in police work often prove to be unhelpful, generating numerous inaccurate predictions. Despite claims of assisted predictions, there tends to be a lack of significant, reliable results.
Scientific Standards: Rigorous scientific testing reveals that claims of ESP have not consistently borne out under scrutiny; thus, skepticism remains widespread in the scientific community.

Perception is a complex interplay of sensory input, cognitive processes, and context. Understanding perception aids in reducing errors, enhancing safety in environments such as driving and aviation, and helps in designing user-friendly devices.