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Inpsychologyand thecognitive sciences, perception is the process ofattaining awareness or understanding ofsensoryinformation.It is a taskfar more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it

was proclaimed that building perceiving machines would take about a

decade, but, needless to say, that is still very far from reality. The wordperception comes from the Latin perception, percepio, , meaning"receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with themind or senses."

There are two basic theories of perception: Passive Perception (PP) andActive Perception (PA). The passive perception (conceived byRenDescartes) is addressed in this article and could be surmised as thefollowing sequence of events: surroundinginput (senses)processing (brain)output (re-action). Although still supported bymainstream philosophers,psychologistsandneurologists,this theory isnowadays losing momentum. The theory of active perception hasemerged from extensive research ofsensory illusions,most notably the

works of Professor EmeritusRichard L. Gregory.This theory isincreasingly gaining experimental support and could be surmised asdynamic relationship between description (in the brain)sensessurrounding.

Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldestquantitative law in psychology is theWeber-Fechner law,whichquantifies the relationship between the intensity of physical stimuli and

their perceptual effects. It was the study of perception that gave rise totheGestaltschool of psychology, with its emphasis onholisticapproach.

Perception and reality

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see thepercept shift in theirmind's eye.Others who are notpicture thinkers,may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes.The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: anambiguousimagehas multiple interpretations on the perceptual level.

Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object mayfail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in aperson's experience, the person may literally not perceive it.

Perception alters what humans see, into a diluted version ofreality,which ultimately corrupts the way humans perceive the truth. Whenpeople view something with a preconceived idea about it, they tend to

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take those preconceived ideas and see them whether or not they arethere. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable tounderstand new information, without the inherentbiasof their previousknowledge. The extent of a persons knowledge creates their reality as

much as thetruth,because the human mind can only contemplate thatwhich it has been exposed to. When objects are viewed withoutunderstanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it alreadyrecognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That which mostclosely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up

what we see when we look at things that we dont comprehend. This confusingambiguityof perception is exploited in human

technologies such ascamouflage,and also in biologicalmimicry,forexample byPeacock butterflies,whose wings bear eye markings that

birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerouspredator.Perceptual ambiguity is not restricted to vision. For example,recenttouch perceptionresearch (Robles-De-La-Torre & Hayward 2001)found thatkinesthesia-basedhapticperception strongly relies on theforces experienced during touch. This makes it possible toproduceillusory touch percepts(see also the MIT Technology ReviewarticleThe Cutting Edge of Haptics).

Cognitivetheories of perception assume there is apoverty of stimulus.This (with reference to perception) is the claim thatsensations are, bythemselves, unable to provide a unique description of the

world.Sensationsrequire 'enriching', which is the role of thementalmodel.A different type of theory is theperceptualecologyapproach ofJames J. Gibson.Gibson rejected the assumption ofapoverty of stimulusby rejecting the notion that perception is based insensations. Instead, he investigated what information is actuallypresented to the perceptual systems. He (andthe psychologistswho work

within thisparadigm) detailed how the world could be specified to amobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of informationabout the world into energy arrays. Specification is a 1:1 mapping of

some aspect of the world into a perceptual array; given such a mapping,no enrichment is required and perception isdirect.

Perception-in-action

The ecological understanding of perception advanced from Gibson'searly work is perception-in-action, the notion that perception is a

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requisite property of animate action, without perception action wouldnot be guided and without action perception would be pointless. Animateactions require perceiving and moving together. In a sense, "perceptionand movement are two sides of the same coin, the coin is action." A

mathematical theory of perception-in-action has been devised andinvestigated in many forms of controlled movement by many differentspecies of organism,General Tau Theory.According to this theory, tauinformation, or time-to-goal information is the fundamental 'percept' inperception.-

Perception and action

We gather information about the world and interact with it through ouractions. Perceptual information is critical for action. Perceptual deficits

may lead to profound deficits in action.

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