The Process of Forming Perceptions SHMD219

Perception The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. Perception is a series of processes in which you gather information from the environment around you as well as from within your own body in order to understand the situation in which you find yourself. 2

The outcome of that final processing is your “understanding” of the situation, which is also called your “perception of the situation” 3

Cognitive Skills needed to Form Perceptions The ability to recognize familiar situations by drawing on your past experiences in similar situations. The ability to understand, which allows you to make educated guesses about what is happening in a new or unusual situation. 4

The Ability to Recognize familiar Situations When you observe or participate in a movement situation, you assemble the sensory information that reaches your cortex into an impression that forms a kind of mental image of the situation. your first attempt to understand what that impression means is to look for similarities between what is currently happening and what has happed to you in the past 5

Your memories of your past perceptual experiences are stored in neural networks called perceptual traces. A perceptual trace is a memory structure where you store information about how things looked how they sounded how they felt in past movement situation. When you try to understand a new situation, you take your impression of the “new” situation and search for a match among your memories (perceptual traces) about similar situations in the past 6

The quality of the perceptual traces in your memory depends upon how much experience you have in a specific movement situation. The more often you have experienced a particular situation, the stronger the perceptual trace becomes. 7

Forming Perceptions Using your Ability to recognise familiar Situations In every game, sport, dance and exercise form, there are key perceptual signals that must be learned if you want to understand what is happening. 8

The Ability to Make inferences Making inferences relies on your ability to reason. Reasoning includes your ability to make judgments, interpretations, conclusions, and creative thinking to put together a concept about what is happening in a new situation. A concept is a memory structure where you store your general understanding of a movement situation 9

The ability to form concepts/idea is crucial to learning If you could not form concepts, you would experience every new situation as a totally strange one. You would have to learn every new game or sport, for example, "from scratch.“ As an absolute beginner, you would be totally helpless because you would have no idea what was going on. You would have to be shown and told everything specifically because you could only function in situations in which you had established strong memory traces 10

By using your reasoning process, you draw what can help you from your past experience and transfer what can help you understand what is happening in new and unfamiliar situations, If the situation is new you will not be able to transfer enough detail to understand exactly what is happening, but you can use your judgment, your imagination to make an inference about what is happening, To make an inference is to form “ a good idea” or concept about what is happening 11

How the Brain Forms a Perception In each of the four cerebral lobes are networks of nerve cells that are concerned with receiving and interpreting information from all of your sensory systems. These upper brain regions are able to store your memories as well as allow you to determine meaning, make decisions and issue commands for the muscle actions that result in motor skill performance. 12

Four Cerebral Lobes 13

How the Brain Forms a Perception Through the process of perception, the brain is able to interpret patterns of information from incoming sensory information and create memory structures that represent what the world is like. These memory structures are continually updated with new information gained through experience. 14

How the Brain Forms a Perception The specific relationship between intellectual functions and the structure of the brain has yet to be fully defined. However, a few general patterns of information processing have been identified. 15

How the Brain Forms a Perception 1. Sensory neurons ' from the visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic receptors carry a wealth of information to the major relay station of the brain, the thalamus. In the thalamus some initial integration of information from individual senses may occur before the information is passed on to specific areas in the cortex for further processing 16

Association Areas 17

How the Brain Forms a Perception 2. The various association areas of the cortex sift, sort, organize and finally present information to us which we perceive as the sensation of, sight, sounds, touch and motion as well as the more abstract sensations of feelings, thoughts, emotions and memories. 18

How the Brain Forms a Perception 3. Forming a perception involves the activation of certain neurons and neuron combinations in the association areas of the cortex. 19

3.1 Stimuli gathered by the eyes are sent to the visual and visual association areas of the occipital lobes to produce what we experience as vision. 3.2 Stimuli gathered by the ears are sent for interpretation to the auditory and auditory association areas within the temporal lobes to produce what we experience as hearing 3.3 Sensations of touch and proprioception are perceived in the sensory cortex of the parietal lobe. sensory nerves from the body cross either in the spinal cord or in the brain stem, so that sensations from the left side of the body reach the sensory cortex in the right cerebral hemisphere, and those from the right side of the body are registered in the cortex in the left cerebral hemisphere. 20

Because each region of the body sends signals to a defined area of the sensory cortex, it has been possible to map the areas of the body on the cortex itself. The strip of sensory cortex in left hemisphere corresponds to the right side of the body, and is duplicated in the other hemisphere for the left side of the body. This map on the cortex is referred to as the sensory homunculus. 21

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