In this video, we turn our attention from sensation to perception. We focus on the ways in which we perceive, illusions that mess with our perpetual experiences, and finally, the Gestalt Principles.

BottomUp Processing: Perceiving the parts and using them to create the whole.

TopDown Processing: Beliefs and expectations about the whole are used to process the parts.

Perceptual Hypotheses: Educated guesses that we make while interpreting sensory information to generate a perceptual set.

Perceptual Set: A predisposition to perceive things in a certain way, driven by our expectations.

Perceptual Constancy: We perceive stimuli consistently across varied conditions; there are many forms of perceptual constancy, including color constancy and size constancy.

Gestalt Psychology: A field of psychology which assumes that the brain creates a perception that is more than the sum of the available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways (the Gestalt Principles).

Proximity: The first of the Gestalt Principles, which states that objects close together tend to go together.

Similarity: The second of the Gestalt Principles, which states that similar things tend to go together more than dissimilar things.

Continuity: The third of the Gestalt Principles, which states that we are more likely to perceive continuous, smooth flowing lines rather than jagged, broken lines.

Closure: The fourth of the Gestalt Principles, which states that we organize our perceptions into complete objects rather than a series of disconnected parts.

Symmetry: The fifth of the Gestalt Principles, which states that symmetrical objects are more likely to be arranged as wholes than nonsymmetrical objects.

FigureGround: The sixth of the Gestalt Principles, which states that we make an instantaneous decision to focus our attention on what we believe to be the central figure and largely ignore what we believe to be the background.