Sense Perception's Effect On The Stages Of Sense Perception

Introduction Sense perception is the process in which the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, perceive an external stimulus of the knowledge about the outside world. Our senses act as an important source of knowledge about the world but instead of passively reflecting reality, it actively structures it. As such, understanding the world through sense perception is an active process that requires our brain to categorize and interpret what it is we are sensing. Yet, can the knowledge acquired through our senses be entirely trusted, relied and depended upon? There are certain factors that may interfere with how we perceive the world with our senses. Thus, sense perception, as a way of knowing, is selective and subjected to

It can exert influences and control what we ascertain and perceive from our senses in specific previously encountered situations. For example, a person who had a past experience of getting bitten by a dog would always see dogs as dangerous creatures due to the pain that he experienced from that event. Yet, those who have not experienced the pain from a dog’s bite would not have this perception. As seen, learning from previous experiences has a paramount effect on all stages of our sensory perceptual process. It critically affects the sensory data perceived in the first instance and subsequently how the stimulus is being inferred, processed and finally responded to. Thus, previously encountered experiences with either negative or positive after effects in similar events may generate strong biasness, conditioning us to expect things rather than what really happens. This is evident in the natural sciences where past experiences from experiments condition us to expect certain outcomes and influences how we perceive through our senses. There are bound to be certain uncertainties in science experiments and thus we usually repeat them. When we repeat these experiments, our previous experience with the various materials of study, indents in us certain expectations, influencing what and how we perceive through our senses in the next repeat. In Physics, where we investigate the effects of air resistance on the trajectory of a projectile, based on previous experimentations we might observe that it would result in a lower height and smaller range