Developmental psychology.pdf

Perception and Consciousness 163
Figure 6.17
Interpretation of the Muller-Lyer
Illusion. The vertical colored lines are
the same length, but A represents a
near corner and В a far corner. Since
В is presumed to be more distant, it
seems longer than A.
In illusions, and also in more accurate judgments about stimuli, we see that
perception is a synthesizing or creative process. We try to make something meaningful
out of the information coming from the environment and previous experience. To some
degree we create our own perceptions and misperceptions. They "come from us, not
from our surroundings. The perceiver decides what an object is ... he makes it what
he chooses to make it, and can make it, in the light of his unique experience and purpose"
(Kelley, 1955).
Obstacles in Person Perception
Perhaps the most challenging and important perceptual task for all of us is the perception
of other people. We are endlessly trying to make accurate judgments about
other human beings, but often we meet with little success. What factors make person
perception so much more difficult than object perception?
Interest in Psychological Characteristics First, when we perceive other people,
we usually try to determine something more than physical characteristics. We want to
understand the other individual from a psychological standpoint as well.*
Itard had curly hair, a slanting forehead, and an aquiline nose that extended
almost to his bold chin, but these characteristics are not as important to us as his attitudes,
intellect, and personality traits. Usually we are looking for internal and abstract
qualities, although our information is limited to physical and behavioral
characteristics. We make inferences about inner qualities, combining current experience
with previous information, in forming an impression of Jean Itard. The process
is a creative one and also prone to error.
In passing, we should note that the relationship between physical characteristics
and personality is not impressive. If Itard has a large forehead, we cannot say
very much about what that means in terms of personality. There is no significant relationship
between the size of one's forehead and one's intellect, and the relationship
between body type and personality is also doubtful. Even in the few instances in which
correlations have been found, they pertain to groups of people rather than to individuals
(Rees, 1961; Walker, 1962).
*How many of your close
friends, of both sexes, do you think
ugly? I, for one, cannot say that any
of my friends are painful to look at,
or ugly, or even unattractive. But I
can remember that upon meeting
some of these people the first time
I did notice that some of them were
less than beautiful. In fact, if I try to
recapture the face I saw when we
first met, which is next to
impossible, I realize that a type of
nose or a cowlick that I found oddlooking
now goes unnoticed in the
presence of other qualities. . . .
Changing Personal Qualities In object perception the size and shape of the retinal
image change as the perceiver moves about in space, but the object itself is relatively
constant in most cases. The observer makes generalizations about a distal stimulus that
is comparatively stable.