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How expectation influences perception

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For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called “prior beliefs,” help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present, based on similar past experiences. Consider, for instance, how a shadow on a patient’s X-ray image, easily missed by a less experienced intern, jumps out at a seasoned physician. The physician’s prior experience helps her arrive at the most probable interpretation of a weak signal.

The process of combining prior knowledge with uncertain evidence is known as Bayesian integration and is believed to widely impact our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Now, MIT neuroscientists have discovered distinctive brain signals that encode these prior beliefs. They have also found how the brain uses these signals to make judicious decisions in the face of uncertainty.

“How these beliefs come to influence brain activity and bias our perceptions was the question we wanted to answer,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

The researchers trained animals to perform a timing task in which they had to reproduce different time intervals. Performing this task is challenging because our sense of time is imperfect and can go too fast or too slow. However, when intervals are consistently within a fixed range, the best strategy is to bias responses toward the middle of the range. This is exactly what animals did. Moreover, recording from neurons in the frontal cortex revealed a simple mechanism for Bayesian integration: Prior experience warped the representation of time in the brain so that patterns of neural activity associated with different intervals were biased toward those that were within the expected range.

MIT postdoc Hansem Sohn, former postdoc Devika Narain, and graduate student Nicolas Meirhaeghe are the lead authors of the study, which appears in the July 15 issue of Neuron .

Ready, set, go

Statisticians have known for centuries that Bayesian integration is the optimal strategy for handling uncertain information. When we are uncertain about something, we automatically rely on our prior experiences to optimize behavior.

“If you can’t quite tell what something is, but from your prior experience you have some expectation of what it ought to be, then you will use that information to guide your judgment,” Jazayeri says. “We do this all the time.”

In this new study, Jazayeri and his team wanted to understand how the brain encodes prior beliefs, and put those beliefs to use in the control of behavior. To that end, the researchers trained animals to reproduce a time interval, using a task called “ready-set-go.” In this task, animals measure the time between two flashes of light (“ready” and “set”) and then generate a “go” signal by making a delayed response after the same amount of time has elapsed.

They trained the animals to perform this task in two contexts. In the “Short” scenario, intervals varied between 480 and 800 milliseconds, and in the “Long” context, intervals were between 800 and 1,200 milliseconds. At the beginning of the task, the animals were given the information about the context (via a visual cue), and therefore knew to expect intervals from either the shorter or longer range.

Jazayeri had previously shown that humans performing this task tend to bias their responses toward the middle of the range. Here, they found that animals do the same. For example, if animals believed the interval would be short, and were given an interval of 800 milliseconds, the interval they produced was a little shorter than 800 milliseconds. Conversely, if they believed it would be longer, and were given the same 800-millisecond interval, they produced an interval a bit longer than 800 milliseconds.  

“Trials that were identical in almost every possible way, except the animal’s belief led to different behaviors,” Jazayeri says. “That was compelling experimental evidence that the animal is relying on its own belief.”

Once they had established that the animals relied on their prior beliefs, the researchers set out to find how the brain encodes prior beliefs to guide behavior. They recorded activity from about 1,400 neurons in a region of the frontal cortex, which they have previously shown is involved in timing.

During the “ready-set” epoch, the activity profile of each neuron evolved in its own way, and about 60 percent of the neurons had different activity patterns depending on the context (Short versus Long). To make sense of these signals, the researchers analyzed the evolution of neural activity across the entire population over time, and found that prior beliefs bias behavioral responses by warping the neural representation of time toward the middle of the expected range.

“We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities,” says Mate Lengyel, a professor of computational neuroscience at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the study.

Embedded knowledge

Researchers believe that prior experiences change the strength of connections between neurons. The strength of these connections, also known as synapses, determines how neurons act upon one another and constrains the patterns of activity that a network of interconnected neurons can generate. The finding that prior experiences warp the patterns of neural activity provides a window onto how experience alters synaptic connections. “The brain seems to embed prior experiences into synaptic connections so that patterns of brain activity are appropriately biased,” Jazayeri says.

As an independent test of these ideas, the researchers developed a computer model consisting of a network of neurons that could perform the same ready-set-go task. Using techniques borrowed from machine learning, they were able to modify the synaptic connections and create a model that behaved like the animals.

These models are extremely valuable as they provide a substrate for the detailed analysis of the underlying mechanisms, a procedure that is known as "reverse-engineering.” Remarkably, reverse-engineering the model revealed that it solved the task the same way the monkeys’ brain did. The model also had a warped representation of time according to prior experience.  

The researchers used the computer model to further dissect the underlying mechanisms using perturbation experiments that are currently impossible to do in the brain. Using this approach, they were able to show that unwarping the neural representations removes the bias in the behavior. This important finding validated the critical role of warping in Bayesian integration of prior knowledge.

The researchers now plan to study how the brain builds up and slowly fine-tunes the synaptic connections that encode prior beliefs as an animal is learning to perform the timing task.

The research was funded by the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, the Netherlands Scientific Organization, the Marie Sklodowska Curie Reintegration Grant, the National Institutes of Health, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the McGovern Institute.

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• Paper: "Bayesian computation through cortical latent dynamics"
• Mehrdad Jazayeri
• McGovern Institute for Brain Research
• Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

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What Is Perception?

Recognizing Environmental Stimuli Through the Five Senses

Types of Perception

• How It Works

Perception Process

• Influential Factors
• Improvement Tips
• Potential Pitfalls

History of Perception

Perception refers to our sensory experience of the world. It is the process of using our senses to become aware of objects, relationships, and events. It is through this experience that we gain information about the environment around us.

Perception relies on the cognitive functions we use to process information, such as utilizing memory to recognize the face of a friend or detect a familiar scent. Through the perception process, we are able to both identify and respond to environmental stimuli.

Perception includes the five senses: touch, sight, sound, smell , and taste . It also includes what is known as proprioception , which is a set of senses that enable us to detect changes in body position and movement.

Many stimuli surround us at any given moment. Perception acts as a filter that allows us to exist within and interpret the world without becoming overwhelmed by this abundance of stimuli.

The different senses often separate the types of perception. These include visual, scent, touch, sound, and taste perception. We perceive our environment using each of these, often simultaneously.

There are also different types of perception in psychology, including:

• Person perception refers to the ability to identify and use social cues about people and relationships.
• Social perception is how we perceive certain societies and can be affected by things such as stereotypes and generalizations.

Another type of perception is selective perception. This involves paying attention to some parts of our environment while ignoring others.

The different types of perception allow us to experience our environment and interact with it in ways that are both appropriate and meaningful.

How Perception Works

Through perception, we become more aware of (and can respond to) our environment. We use perception in communication to identify how our loved ones may feel. We use perception in behavior to decide what we think about individuals and groups.

We perceive things continuously, even though we don't typically spend a great deal of time thinking about them. For example, the light that falls on our eye's retinas transforms into a visual image unconsciously and automatically. Subtle changes in pressure against our skin, allowing us to feel objects, also occur without a single thought.

Mindful Moment

Need a breather? Take this free 9-minute meditation focused on awakening your senses —or choose from our guided meditation library to find another one that will help you feel your best.

To better understand how we become aware of and respond to stimuli in the world around us, it can be helpful to look at the perception process. This varies somewhat for every sense.

In regard to our sense of sight, the perception process looks like this:

• Environmental stimulus: The world is full of stimuli that can attract attention. Environmental stimulus is everything in our surroundings that has the potential to be perceived.
• Attended stimulus: The attended stimulus is the specific object in the environment on which our attention is focused.
• Image on the retina: This part of the perception process involves light passing through the cornea and pupil onto the lens of the eye. The cornea helps focus the light as it enters, and the iris controls the size of the pupils to determine how much light to let in. The cornea and lens act together to project an inverted image onto the retina.
• Transduction: The image on the retina is then transformed into electrical signals through a process known as transduction. This allows the visual messages to be transmitted to the brain to be interpreted.
• Neural processing: After transduction, the electrical signals undergo neural processing. The path followed by a particular signal depends on what type of signal it is (for example, an auditory signal or a visual signal).
• Perception: In this step of the perception process, you perceive the stimulus object in the environment. It is at this point that you become consciously aware of the stimulus.
• Recognition: Perception doesn't just involve becoming consciously aware of the stimuli. It is also necessary for the brain to categorize and interpret what you are sensing. This next step, known as recognition, is the ability to interpret and give meaning to the object.
• Action: The action phase of the perception process involves some type of motor activity that occurs in response to the perceived stimulus. This might involve a significant action, like running toward a person in distress. It can also include doing something as subtle as blinking your eyes in response to a puff of dust blowing through the air.

Think of all the things you perceive on a daily basis. At any given moment, you might see familiar objects, feel a person's touch against your skin, smell the aroma of a home-cooked meal, or hear the sound of music playing in your neighbor's apartment. All of these help make up your conscious experience and allow you to interact with the people and objects around you.

Recap of the Perception Process

• Environmental stimulus
• Attended stimulus
• Image on the retina
• Transduction
• Neural processing
• Recognition

Factors Influencing Perception

What makes perception somewhat complex is that we don't all perceive things the same way. One person may perceive a dog jumping on them as a threat, while another person may perceive this action as the pup just being excited to see them.

Our perceptions of people and things are shaped by our prior experiences, our interests, and how carefully we process information. This can cause one person to perceive the exact same person or situation differently than someone else.

Perception can also be affected by our personality. For instance, research has found that four of the Big 5 personality traits —openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism—can impact our perception of organizational justice.

Conversely, our perceptions can also affect our personality. If you perceive that your boss is treating you unfairly, for example, you may show traits related to anger or frustration. If you perceive your spouse to be loving and caring, you may show similar traits in return.

Are Perception and Attitude the Same?

While they are similar, perception and attitude are two different things. Perception is how we interpret the world around us, while our attitudes (our emotions, beliefs, and behaviors) can impact these perceptions.

Tips to Improve Perception

If you want to improve your perception skills, there are some things that you can do. Actions you can take that may help you perceive more in the world around you—or at least focus on the things that are important—include:

• Pay attention. Actively notice the world around you, using all your senses. What do you see, hear, taste, smell, or touch? Using your sense of proprioception, notice the movements of your arms and legs or your changes in body position.
• Make meaning of what you perceive. The recognition stage of the perception process is essential since it allows you to make sense of the world around you. You place objects in meaningful categories so you can understand and react appropriately.
• Take action. The final step of the perception process involves taking some sort of action in response to your environmental stimulus. This could involve a variety of actions, such as stopping to smell the flower you see on the side of the road and incorporating more of your senses into your experiences.

Potential Pitfalls of Perception

The perception process does not always go smoothly, and there are a number of things that may interfere with our ability to interpret and respond to our environment. One is having a disorder that impacts perception.

Perceptual disorders are cognitive conditions marked by an impaired ability to perceive objects or concepts. Some disorders that may affect perception include:

• Spatial neglect syndromes , which involve not attending to stimuli on one side of the body
• Prosopagnosia , also called face blindness, is a disorder that makes it difficult to recognize faces
• Aphantasia , a condition characterized by an inability to visualize things in your mind
• Schizophrenia , a mental health condition that is marked by abnormal perceptions of reality

Some of these conditions may be influenced by genetics, while others result from stroke or brain injury.

Certain factors can also negatively affect perception. For instance, one study found that when people viewed images of others, they perceived individuals with nasal deformities as having less satisfactory personality traits. So, factors such as this can potentially affect personality perception in others.

Interest in perception dates back to ancient Greek philosophers who were interested in how people know the world and gain understanding. As psychology emerged as a science separate from philosophy, researchers became interested in understanding how different aspects of perception worked—particularly the perception of color.

In addition to understanding basic physiological processes, psychologists were also interested in understanding how the mind interprets and organizes these perceptions.

Gestalt psychologists proposed a holistic approach, suggesting that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Cognitive psychologists have also worked to understand how motivations and expectations can play a role in the process of perception.

As time progresses, researchers continue to investigate perception on the neural level. They also look at how injury, conditions, and substances might affect perception.

American Psychological Association. Perception .

University of Minnesota. 3.4 Perception . Organizational Behavior .

Jhangiani R, Tarry H. 5.4 Individual differences in person perception . Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International H5P Edition . Published online January 26, 2022.

Aggarwal A, Nobi K, Mittal A, Rastogi S. Does personality affect the individual's perceptions of organizational justice? The mediating role of organizational politics . Benchmark Int J . 2022;29(3):997-1026. doi:10.1108/BIJ-08-2020-0414

Saylor Academy. Human relations: Perception's effect . Human Relations .

ICFAI Business School. Perception and attitude (ethics) . Personal Effectiveness Management Course .

King DJ, Hodgekins J, Chouinard PA, Chouinard VA, Sperandio I. A review of abnormalities in the perception of visual illusions in schizophrenia .  Psychon Bull Rev . 2017;24(3):734‐751. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1168-5

van Schijndel O, Tasman AJ, Listschel R. The nose influences visual and personality perception . Facial Plast Surg . 2015;31(05):439-445. doi:10.1055/s-0035-1565009

Goldstein E. Sensation and Perception . Thomson Wadsworth; 2010.

Yantis S. Sensation and Perception . Worth Publishers; 2014.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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13.7 Cosmos & Culture

We experience the world we infer, not the world as it is.

Tania Lombrozo

If you want to understand the human mind, you have to reject the idea that we directly perceive and remember the world as it is. Our perceptual experience isn't simply a passive impression of the input received by our senses — and our memory isn't like a photobook or a video, comprehensively recording the details of our experience.

Take an example from visual perception. The image below seems to depict a woman behind a small girl, where the woman is much larger than the girl. But measure on the screen, and you'll discover that each figure is precisely the same height and width.

What's going on?

The key to understanding this illusion is recognizing that your experience of an object's size is not determined only by the amount of space it takes up on your retina, or (in this case) by the amount of space it takes up on a two-dimensional screen. Instead, your experience of size takes into account an object's inferred distance .

In the image above, the linear perspective leads you to infer that the "big" woman is farther away than the "little" girl. If an object that's farther away takes up as much space on your retina as an object that's much closer, then the farther object must be larger. And that inferred size, which is itself a function of inferred distance, determines your experience of size.

Our experience is so closely tied to what we infer — as opposed to what hits the retina — that it can be surprising to see the two figures when depth cues are removed, as in this version here, which first drops the linear perspective and then shifts the upper figure down to the same vertical position as the little girl:

This basic lesson about immediate visual experience is also true of visual memory. A dramatic illustration comes from the phenomenon of "change blindness": We have the experience of continuously and accurately monitoring our visual environment, but we can fail to notice surprisingly large changes. Consider the following classic demonstration here .

Lest you think you're immune to the phenomenon, take a close look at this video by Richard Wiseman:

It isn't just visual memory that's "gappy" — all of our memories are incomplete. But we're so good at filling in those gaps that we don't always appreciate when we're making an inference and not retrieving an original memory.

To illustrate this final point, think back to the way I described the first illusion (and don't look back at the text, that's cheating!). Did I describe the mother as following the small girl or as looking after the small girl?

In fact, I didn't describe a mother at all — I said a woman was behind a small girl. But it would have been reasonable to infer that the woman was the mother, and that she was following or looking after her daughter. If you incorrectly remembered the description in any of these ways, that could reflect an inference on your part — an inference about the relationship between the two figures involved, and why they were in the particular configuration observed.

The upshot is this: We experience and remember the world we infer. We don't have direct access to the world as it is, no matter how "direct" our perceptual experience and memories can sometimes appear to us.

Yet these illusions of perception and memory shouldn't be taken as evidence that we're out of touch with the world, that we're deluded or deceived. In fact, these illusions tell us something about how we get closer to the world than our limited sensory input might otherwise allow. We're not limited, for instance, by the retinal size a particular image happens to project at a particular distance, or by the way two characters happened to be described in one sentence. Instead, we combine this information with other things we know — about the likely distance of objects in our environment, about why a woman and a girl might be together on path. Sometimes the way we combine information and the inferences we draw can lead us to errors, but much of the time they take us closer to the world as it is, thanks to the world we've inferred.

Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo .

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• cognitive illusions
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The Experience and Perception of Time

We see colours, hear sounds and feel textures. Some aspects of the world, it seems, are perceived through a particular sense. Others, like shape, are perceived through more than one sense. But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time? It is certainly not associated with one particular sense. In fact, it seems odd to say that we see, hear or touch time passing. And indeed, even if all our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we could still notice the passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought. Perhaps, then, we have a special faculty, distinct from the five senses, for detecting time. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, we notice time through perception of other things. But how?

Time perception raises a number of intriguing puzzles, including what it means to say we perceive time. In this article, we shall explore the various processes through which we are made aware of time, and which influence the way we think time really is. Inevitably, we shall be concerned with the psychology of time perception, but the purpose of the article is to draw out the philosophical issues, and in particular whether and how aspects of our experience can be accommodated within certain metaphysical theories concerning the nature of time and causation.

1. What is ‘the perception of time’?

2. kinds of temporal experience, 3. duration, 4. the specious present, 5. past, present and the passage of time, 6. time order, 7. the metaphysics of time perception, other internet resources, related entries.

The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations. So, just as it is natural to say that we perceive spatial distances and other relations between objects (I see the dragonfly as hovering above the surface of the water), it seems natural to talk of perceiving one event following another (the thunderclap as following the flash of lightning), though even here there is a difficulty. For what we perceive, we perceive as present —as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves? If not, then it seems we perceive both events as present, in which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, and so not as successive after all. There is then a paradox in the notion of perceiving an event as occurring after another, though one that perhaps admits of a straightforward solution. When we perceive B as coming after A, we have, surely, ceased to perceive A. In which case, A is merely an item in our memory. Now if we wanted to construe ‘perceive’ narrowly, excluding any element of memory, then we would have to say that we do not, after all, perceive B as following A. But in this article, we shall construe ‘perceive’ more broadly, to include a wide range of experiences of time that essentially involve the senses. In this wide sense, we perceive a variety of temporal aspects of the world. We shall begin by enumerating these, and then consider accounts of how such perception is possible.

There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Among these we may list the experience of (i) duration; (ii) non-simultaneity; (iii) order; (iv) past and present; (v) change, including the passage of time. It might be thought that experience of non-simultaneity is the same as experience of time order, but it appears that, when two events occur very close together in time, we can be aware that they occur at different times without being able to say which one came first (see Hirsh and Sherrick 1961). We might also think that perception of order was itself explicable in terms of our experience of the distinction between past and present. There will certainly be links here, but it is a contentious question whether the experience of tense —that is, experiencing an event as past or present—is more fundamental than the experience of order, or vice versa, or whether indeed there is such a thing as the experience of tense at all. This issue is taken up below. Finally, we should expect to see links between the perception of time order and the perception of motion if the latter simply involves perception of the order of the different spatial positions of an object. This is another contentious issue that is taken up below.

One of the earliest, and most famous, discussions of the nature and experience of time occurs in the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine. Augustine was born in Numidia (now Algeria) in 354 AD, held chairs in rhetoric at Carthage and Milan, and become Bishop of Hippo in 395. He died in 430. As a young adult, he had rejected Christianity, but was finally converted at the age of 32. Book XI of the Confessions contains a long and fascinating exploration of time, and its relation to God. During the course of it Augustine raises the following conundrum: when we say that an event or interval of time is short or long, what is it that is being described as of short or long duration? It cannot be what is past, since that has ceased to be, and what is non-existent cannot presently have any properties, such as being long. But neither can it be what is present, for the present has no duration. (For the reason why the present must be regarded as durationless, see the section on the specious present, below.) In any case, while an event is still going on, its duration cannot be assessed.

Augustine’s answer to this riddle is that what we are measuring, when we measure the duration of an event or interval of time, is in the memory. From this he derives the radical conclusion that past and future exist only in the mind. While not following Augustine all the way to the mind-dependence of other times, we can concede that the perception of temporal duration is crucially bound up with memory. It is some feature of our memory of the event (and perhaps specifically our memory of the beginning and end of the event) that allows us to form a belief about its duration. This process need not be described, as Augustine describes it, as a matter of measuring something wholly in the mind. Arguably, at least, we are measuring the event or interval itself, a mind-independent item, but doing so by means of some psychological process.

Whatever the process in question is, it seems likely that it is intimately connected with what William Friedman (1990) calls ‘time memory’: that is, memory of when some particular event occurred. That there is a close connection here is entailed by the plausible suggestion that we infer (albeit subconsciously) the duration of an event, once it has ceased, from information about how long ago the beginning of that event occurred. That is, information that is metrical in nature (e.g. ‘the burst of sound was very brief’) is derived from tensed information, concerning how far in the past something occurred. The question is how we acquire this tensed information. It may be direct or indirect, a contrast we can illustrate by two models of time memory described by Friedman. He calls the first the strength model of time memory. If there is such a thing as a memory trace that persists over time, then we could judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. The longer ago the event, the weaker the trace. This provides a simple and direct means of assessing the duration of an event. Unfortunately, the trace model comes into conflict with a very familiar feature of our experience: that some memories of recent events may fade more quickly than memories of more distant events, especially when those distant events were very salient ones (visiting a rarely seen and frightening relative when one was a child, for instance.) A contrasting account of time memory is the inference model . According to this, the time of an event is not simply read off from some aspect of the memory of it, but is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.

The inference model may be plausible enough when we are dealing with distant events, but rather less so for much more recent ones. In addition, the model posits a rather complex cognitive operation that is unlikely to occur in non-human animals, such as the rat. Rats, however, are rather good at measuring time over short intervals of up to a minute, as demonstrated by instrumental conditioning experiments involving the ‘free operant procedure’. In this, a given response (such as depressing a lever) will delay the occurrence of an electric shock by a fixed period of time, such as 40 seconds, described as the R-S (response-shock) interval. Eventually, rate of responding tracks the R-S interval, so that the probability of responding increases rapidly as the end of the interval approaches. (See Mackintosh 1983 for a discussion of this and related experiments.) It is hard to avoid the inference here that the mere passage of time itself is acting as a conditioned stimulus: that the rats, to put it in more anthropocentric terms, are successfully estimating intervals of time. In this case, the strength model seems more appropriate than the inference model.

The term ‘specious present’ was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, but the best known characterisation of it was due to William James, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology. He lived from 1842 to 1910, and was professor both of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard. His definition of the specious present goes as follows: ‘the prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ (James 1890). How long is this specious present? Elsewhere in the same work, James asserts ‘We are constantly aware of a certain duration—the specious present—varying from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and another part later) is the original intuition of time.’ This surprising variation in the length of the specious present makes one suspect that more than one definition is hidden in James’ rather vague characterisation.

There are two sources of ambiguity here. One is over whether ‘the specious present’ refers to the object of the experience, namely a duration in time, or the way in which that object is presented to us. The second is over how we should interpret ‘immediately sensible’. James’ words suggest that the specious present is the duration itself, picked out as the object of a certain kind of experience. But ‘ immediately sensible’admits of a number of disambiguations. So we could define the specious present as:

• the span of short-term memory;
• the duration which is perceived, not as duration, but as instantaneous;
• the duration which is directly perceived — i.e. not through the intermediary of a number of other, perhaps instantaneous, perceptions;
• the duration which is perceived both as present and as extended in time.

If James means the first of these, that would certainly explain his suggestion that it could last up to a minute. But this does not seem to have much to do specifically with the experience of presentness , since we can certainly hold something in the short-term memory and yet recognise it as past. James may be thinking of cases where we are listening to a sentence: if we did not somehow hold all the words in our conscious mind, we would not understand the sentence as a whole. But it is clear that the words are not experienced as simultaneous, for then the result would be an unintelligible jumble of sounds. (2) is illustrated by the familiar fact that some movements are so fast that we see them as a blur, such as when we look at a fan. What is in fact taking place at different times is presented as happening in an instant. But this is not standardly what is meant by the specious present. (3) is a construal that is found in the literature (see, e.g., Kelly 2005), but it is not obvious that that is what James had in mind, since James is concerned with the phenomenology of time perception, and whether or not an experience constitutes a direct or indirect perception of an interval does not seem to be a phenomenological matter. (Besides which, as Kelly points out, we might think it odd to suppose that past parts of the interval could be directly perceived.)

That leaves us with (4): a duration which is perceived both as present and as temporally extended. This present of experience is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present (if there is such a thing — see The metaphysics of time perception below) it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The real or objective present must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in an interval of any duration, there are earlier and later parts. So if any part of that interval is present, there will be another part that is past or future.

But is it possible to perceive something as extended and as present? If we hear a short phrase of music, we seem to hear the phrase as present, and yet — because it is a phrase rather than a single chord — we also hear the notes as successive, and therefore as extending over an interval. If this does not seem entirely convincing, consider the perception of motion. As Broad (1923) puts it, ‘to see a second-hand moving is quite a different thing from "seeing" that a hour-hand has moved.’ It is not that we see the current position of the second hand and remember where it was a second ago: we just see the motion. That leads to the following argument:

Still, there is more than an air of paradox about this. If successive parts of the motion (or musical phrase, or whatever change we perceive) are perceived as present, then surely they are perceived as simultaneous. But if they are perceived as simultaneous, then the motion will simply be a blur, as it is in cases where it is too fast to perceive as motion. The fact that we do not see it as motion suggests that we do not see the successive parts of it as simultaneous, and so do not see them as present. But then how do we explain the distinction to which Broad directs our attention?

One way out of this impasse is to suggest that two quite distinct processes are going on in the perception of motion (and other kinds of change). One is the perception of successive states as successive, for example the different positions of the second hand. The other is the perception of pure movement. This second perception, which may involve a more primitive system than the first, does not contain as part the recognition of earlier and later elements. (Le Poidevin 2007, Chapter 5.) Alternatively, we might attempt to explain the phenomena of temporal experience without appeal to the notion of the specious present at all (see Arstila, 2018).

The previous section indicated the importance of distinguishing between perceiving the present and perceiving something as present. We may perceive as present items that are past. Indeed, given the finite speed of the transmission of both light and sound (and the finite speed of transmission of information from receptors to brain), it seems that we only ever perceive what is past. However, this does not by itself tell us what it is to perceive something as present, rather than as past. Nor does it explain the most striking feature of our experience as-of the present: that it is constantly changing. The passage (or apparent passage) of time is its most striking feature, and any account of our perception of time must account for this aspect of our experience.

Here is one attempt to do so. The first problem is to explain why our temporal experience is limited in a way in which our spatial experience is not. We can perceive objects that stand in a variety of spatial relations to us: near, far, to the left or right, up or down, etc. Our experience is not limited to the immediate vicinity (although of course our experience is spatially limited to the extent that sufficiently distant objects are invisible to us). But, although we perceive the past, we do not perceive it as past, but as present. Moreover, our experience does not only appear to be temporally limited, it is so: we do not perceive the future, and we do not continue to perceive transient events long after information from them reached our senses. Now, there is a very simple answer to the question why we do not perceive the future, and it is a causal one. Briefly, causes always precede their effects; perception is a causal process, in that to perceive something is to be causally affected by it; therefore we can only perceive earlier events, never later ones. So one temporal boundary of our experience is explained; what of the other?

There seems no logical reason why we should not directly experience the distant past. We could appeal to the principle that there can be no action at a temporal distance, so that something distantly past can only causally affect us via more proximate events. But this is inadequate justification. We can only perceive a spatially distant tree by virtue of its effects on items in our vicinity (light reflected off the tree impinging on our retinas), but this is not seen by those who espouse a direct realist theory of perception as incompatible with their position. We still see the tree , they say, not some more immediate object. Perhaps then we should look for a different strategy, such as the following one, which appeals to biological considerations. To be effective agents in the world, we must represent accurately what is currently going on: to be constantly out of date in our beliefs while going about our activities would be to face pretty immediate extinction. Now we are fortunate in that, although we only perceive the past it is, in most cases, the very recent past, since the transmission of light and sound, though finite, is extremely rapid. Moreover, although things change, they do so, again in most cases, at a rate that is vastly slower than the rate at which information from external objects travels to us. So when we form beliefs about what is going on in the world, they are largely accurate ones. (See Butterfield 1984 for a more detailed account along these lines.) But, incoming information having been registered, it needs to move into the memory to make way for more up to date information. For, although things may change slowly relative to the speed of light or of sound, they do change, and we cannot afford to be simultaneously processing conflicting information. So our effectiveness as agents depends on our not continuing to experience a transient state of affairs (rather in the manner of a slow motion film) once information from it has been absorbed. Evolution has ensured that we do not experience anything other than the very recent past (except when we are looking at the heavens).

To perceive something as present is simply to perceive it: we do not need to postulate some extra item in our experience that is ‘the experience of presentness.’ It follows that there can be no ‘perception of pastness’. In addition, if pastness were something we could perceive, then we would perceive everything in this way, since every event is past by the time we perceive it. But even if we never perceive anything as past (at the same time as perceiving the event in question) we could intelligibly talk more widely of the experience of pastness: the experience we get when something comes to an end. And it has been suggested that memories—more specifically, episodic memories , those of our experiences of past events—are accompanied by a feeling of pastness (see Russell 1921). The problem that this suggestion is supposed to solve is that an episodic memory is simply a memory of an event: it represents the event simpliciter, rather than the fact that the event is past. So we need to postulate something else which alerts us to the fact that the event remembered is past. An alternative account, and one which does not appeal to any phenomenological aspects of memory, is that memories dispose us to form past-tensed beliefs, and is by virtue of this that they represent an event as past.

We have, then, a candidate explanation for our experience of being located at a particular moment in time, the (specious) present. And as the content of that experience is constantly changing, so that position in time shifts. But there is still a further puzzle. Change in our experience is not the same thing as experience of change. We want to know, not just what it is to perceive one event after another, but also what it is to perceive an event as occurring after another. Only then will we understand our experience of the passage of time. We turn, then, to the perception of time order.

How do we perceive precedence amongst events? A temptingly simple answer is that the perception of precedence is just a sensation caused by instances of precedence, just as a sensation of red is caused by instances of redness. Hugh Mellor (1998), who considers this line, rejects it for the following reason. If this were the correct explanation, then we could not distinguish between x being earlier than y , and x being later than y , for whenever there is an instance of one relation, there is also an instance of the other. But plainly we are able to distinguish the two cases, so it cannot simply be a matter of perceiving a relation, but something to do with our perception of the relata. But mere perception of the relata cannot be all there is to perceiving precedence. Consider again Broad’s point about the second hand and the hour hand. We first perceive the hour hand in one position, say pointing to 3 o’clock, and later we perceive it in a different position, pointing to half-past 3. So I have two perceptions, one later than the other. I may also be aware of the temporal relationship of the two positions of the hand. Nevertheless, I do not perceive that relationship, in that I do not see the hand moving. In contrast, I do see the second hand move from one position to another: I see the successive positions as successive.

Mellor’s proposal is that I perceive x precede y by virtue of the fact that my perception of x causally affects my perception of y . As I see the second hand in one position, I have in my short-term memory an image (or information in some form) of its immediately previous position, and this image affects my current perception. The result is a perception of movement. The perceived order of different positions need not necessarily be the same as the actual temporal order of those positions, but it will be the same as the causal order of the perceptions of them. Since causes always precede their effects, the temporal order perceived entails a corresponding temporal order in the perceptions. Dainton (2001) has objected to this that, if the account were right, we should not be able to remember perceiving precedence, since we only remember what we can genuinely perceive. But there seems no reason to deny that, just because perception of precedence may involve short-term memory, it does not thereby count as genuine perception.

There is a further disanalogy between perception of colour and perception of time order. What is perceived in the case of colour is something that has a definite spatio-temporal location. The relation of precedence, in contrast, is not something that has any obvious location. But causes do have locations, so the perception of precedence is rather harder to reconcile with the causal theory of perception than the perception of colour (Le Poidevin 2004, 2007).

In effect, Mellor’s idea is that the brain represents time by means of time: that temporally ordered events are represented by similarly temporally ordered experiences. This would make the representation of time unique. (For example, the brain does not represent spatially separated objects by means of spatially separated perceptions, or orange things by orange perceptions.) But why should time be unique in this respect? In other media, time can be represented spatially (as in cartoons, graphs, and analogue clocks) or numerically (as in calendars and digital clocks). So perhaps the brain can represent time by other means. One reason to suppose that it must have other means at its disposal is that time needs to be represented in memory (I recall, both that a was earlier than b , and also the experience of seeing a occur before b) and intention (I intend to F after I G ), but there is no obvious way in which Mellor’s ‘representation of time by time’ account can be extended to these.

On Mellor’s model, the mechanism by which time-order is perceived is sensitive to the time at which perceptions occur, but indifferent to their content (what the perceptions are of). Daniel Dennett (1991) proposes a different model, on which the process is time-independent, but content-sensitive. For example, the brain may infer the temporal order of events by seeing which sequence makes sense of the causal order of those events. One of the advantages of Dennett’s model is that it can account for the rather puzzling cases of ‘backwards time referral’, where perceived order does not follow the order of perceptions. (See Dennett 1991 for a discussion of these cases, and also Roache 1999 for an attempt to reconcile them with Mellor’s account.)

In giving an account of the various aspects of time perception, we inevitably make use of concepts that we take to have an objective counterpart in the world: the past, temporal order, causation, change, the passage of time and so on. But one of the most important lessons of philosophy, for many writers, is that there may be a gap, perhaps even a gulf, between our representation of the world and the world itself, even on a quite abstract level. (It would be fair to add that, for other writers, this is precisely not the lesson philosophy teaches.) Philosophy of time is no exception to this. Indeed, it is interesting to note how many philosophers have taken the view that, despite appearances, time, or some aspect of time, is unreal. In this final section, we will take a look at how three metaphysical debates concerning the nature of the world interact with accounts of time perception.

The first debate concerns the reality of tense, that is, our division of time into past, present and future. Is time really divided in this way? Does what is present slip further and further into the past? Or does this picture merely reflect our perspective on a reality in which there is no uniquely privileged moment, the present, but simply an ordered series of moments? A-theorists say that our ordinary picture of the world as tensed reflects the world as it really is: the passage of time is an objective fact. B-theorists deny this. (The terms A-theory and B-theory derive from McTaggart’s (1908) distinction between two ways in which events can be ordered in time, either as an A-series—that is in terms of whether they are past, present or future — or as a B-series—that is according to whether they are earlier than, later than, or simultaneous with other events.)

For B-theorists, the only objective temporal facts concern relations of precedence and simultaneity between events. (I ignore here the complications introduced by the Special Theory of Relativity, since B-theory—and perhaps A-theory also—can be reformulated in terms which are compatible with the Special Theory.) B-theorists do not deny that our tensed beliefs, such as the belief that a cold front is now passing, or that Sally’s wedding was two years ago , may be true, but they assert that what makes such beliefs true are not facts about the pastness, presentness or futurity of events, but tenseless facts concerning precedence and simultaneity (see Mellor 1998, Oaklander and Smith 1994). On one version of the B-theory, for example, my belief that there is a cold front now passing is true because the passing of the front is simultaneous with my forming the belief. Now one very serious challenge to the tenseless theorist is to explain why, if time does not pass in reality, it appears to do so. What, in B-theoretic terms, is the basis for our experience as-of the passage of time?

The accounts we considered above, first of the temporal restrictions on our experience, and secondly of our experience of time order, did not explicitly appeal to tensed, or A-theoretic notions. The facts we did appeal to look like purely B-theoretic ones: that causes are always earlier than their effects, that things typically change slowly in relation to the speed of transmission of light and sound, that our information-processing capacities are limited, and that there can be causal connections between memories and experiences. So it may be that the tenseless theorist can discharge the obligation to explain why time seems to pass. But two doubts remain. First, perhaps the A- theorist can produce a simpler explanation of our experience. Second, it may turn out that supposedly B-series facts are dependent upon A-series ones, so that, for example, a and b are simultaneous by virtue of the fact that both are present .

What is clear, though, is that there is no direct argument from experience to the A-theory, since the present of experience, being temporally extended and concerning the past, is very different from the objective present postulated by the A-theory. Further, it cannot be taken for granted that the objective passage of time would explain whatever it is that the experience as-of time’s passage is supposed to amount to. (See Prosser 2005, 2007, 2012, 2016, 2018.)

The second metaphysical issue that has a crucial bearing on time perception is connected with the A/B-theory dispute, and that is the debate between presentists and eternalists. Presentists hold that only the present exists (for an articulation of various kinds of presentism, and the challenges they face, see Bourne 2006), whereas eternalists grant equal reality to all times. the two debates, A- versus B-theory and presentism versus eternalism, do not map precisely onto each other. Arguably, B-theory is committed to eternalism, but A-theorists may not necessarily endorse presentism (though Bourne argues that they should).

How might his be connected to perception? According to the indirect (or, as it is sometimes called, representative) theory of perception, we perceive external objects only by perceiving some intermediate object, a sense datum. According to the direct theory, in contrast, perception of external objects involves no such intermediary. Now, external objects are at varying distances from us, and, as noted above, since light and sound travel at finite speeds, that means that the state of objects that we perceive will necessarily lie in the past. In the case of stars, where the distances are very considerable, the time gap between light leaving the star and our perceiving it may be one of many years. The presentist holds that past states, events and objects are no longer real. But if all that we perceive in the external world is past, then it seems that the objects of our perception (or at least the states of those objects that we perceive) are unreal. It is hard to reconcile this with the direct theory of perception. It looks on the face of it, therefore, that presentists are committed to the indirect theory of perception. (See Power 2010a, 2010b, 2018, Le Poidevin 2015b.)

The third and final metaphysical issue that we will discuss in the context of time perception concerns causal asymmetry. The account of our sense of being located at a time which we considered under Past, present and the passage of time rested on the assumption that causation is asymmetric. Later events, it was suggested, cannot affect earlier ones, as a matter of mind-independent fact, and this is why we do not perceive the future, only the past. But attempts to explain the basis of causal asymmetry, in terms for example of counterfactual dependence, or in probabilistic terms, are notoriously problematic. One moral we might draw from the difficulties of reducing causal asymmetry to other asymmetries is that causal asymmetry is primitive, and so irreducible. Another is that that the search for a mind-independent account is mistaken. Perhaps causation in intrinsically symmetric, but some feature of our psychological constitution and relation to the world makes causation appear asymmetric. This causal perspectivalism is the line taken by Huw Price (1996). That causal asymmetry should be explained in part by our psychological constitution, in a way analogous to our understanding of secondary qualities such as colour, is a radical reversal of our ordinary assumptions, but then our ordinary understanding of a number of apparently objective features of the world—tense, absolute simultaneity—have met with similarly radical challenges. Now, if causal asymmetry is mind-dependent in this way, then we cannot appeal to it in accounting for our experience of temporal asymmetry—the difference between past and future.

Further, it is not at all clear that perspectivalism can account for the perception of time order. The mechanism suggested by Mellor (see Time Order ) exploited the asymmetry of causation: it is the fact that the perception of A causally influences the perception of B, but not vice versa, that gives rise to the perception of A’s being followed by B. We can represent this schematically as follows (where the arrow stands for an asymmetric causal relation):

P(A)→P(B)→P(A<B)

But if there is no objective asymmetry, then what is the explanation? Of course, we can still define causal order in terms of a causal betweenness relation, and we can say that the perceived order follows the objective causal order of the perceptions, in this sense: on the one hand, where A is perceived as being followed by B, then the perception of B is always causally between the perception of A and the perception of A’s being followed by B (the dash represents a symmetric causal relation):

P(A) – P(B) – P(A<B)

On the other hand, where B is perceived as being followed by A, the perception of A is always causally between the perception of B and the perception of B’s being followed by A:

P(B) – P(A)) – P(B<A)

But what, on the causal perspectivalist view, would rule out the following case?

P(B<A) – P(A) – P(B) – P(A<B)

For such a case would satisfy the above constraints. But it is a case in which A is perceived by an observer both as following, and as being followed by, B, and we know that such a case never occurs in experience. ‘Is perceived by x as followed by’ is an asymmetric relation (assuming we are dealing with a single sense modality), and so one that can be grounded in the causal relation only if the causal relation is itself asymmetric. Now if perspectivalism cannot meet the challenge to explain why, when B is perceived as following A, A is never perceived by the same observer as following B, it seems that our experience of time order, insofar as it has a causal explanation, requires causation to be objectively asymmetric.

One strategy the causal perspectivalist could adopt (indeed, the only one available) is to explain the asymmetric principle above in terms of some objective non-causal asymmetry. Price, for example, allows an objective thermodynamic asymmetry, in that an ordered series of states of the universe will exhibit what he calls a thermodynamic gradient: entropy will be lower at one end of the series than at the end. We should resist the temptation to say that entropy increases, for that would be like asserting that a road goes uphill rather than downhill without conceding the perspectival nature of descriptions like ‘uphill’. Could such a thermodynamic asymmetry explain the perception of time order? That is a question for the reader to ponder.

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Augustine of Hippo | consciousness: temporal | memory | perception: the problem of | presentism | space and time: being and becoming in modern physics | time

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Perceiving Is Believing

How naive realism influences our perception of everything..

Posted January 23, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

The only true voyage of discovery...would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust

Perception is everything—and it is flawed. Most of us navigate our daily lives believing we see the world as it is. Our brains are perceiving an objective reality, right? Well, not quite. Everything we bring in through our senses is interpreted through the filter of our past experiences.

Understanding Sensation and Perception

Sensation is physical energy detection by our sensory organs. Our eyes, mouth, tongue, nose, and skin relay raw data via a process of transduction, which is akin to the translation of physical energy—such as sound waves—into the electrochemical energy the brain understands. At this point, the information is the same from person to person—it is unbiased.

To understand human perception, you must first understand that all information in and of itself is meaningless. — Beau Lotto

While Dr. Lotto's statement is bold, from the perspective of neuroscience , it is true. Meaning is applied to everything, from the simplest to the most complex sensory input. Our brain's interpretation of the raw sensory information is known as perception. Everything from our senses is filtered through our unique system of past experiences in the world. Usually, the meaning we apply is functional and adequate—if not fully accurate, but sometimes our inaccurate perceptions create real-world difficulty.

Perceptual Illusions

There are numerous optical illusions that distinctly convey how easily our perception can lead us to incorrect conclusions. Psychologist Roger Shepard (1990) illustrated that our perceptions can be inaccurate with his famous table-top demonstration (see video below), which clearly establishes that our brains may fool us into perceiving an erroneous view of reality regarding even the simplest of visual perceptual questions.

Countless illusion examples may be found in psychology textbooks or via internet searches, but this captivating video unmistakably illustrates how our past experiences in the world interfere with our accurate perception regarding a simple line length comparison.

How does our brain get deceived ? We trust that our perceptual system constructs accurate representations of the surrounding world. However, our assumptions regarding perception are unsupported by evidence. The deficient understanding of how we perceive the world was originally termed naive realism by Lee Ross and his colleagues in the 1990s. Naive realism is thought to be the theoretical foundation for many cognitive biases , such as the fundamental attribution error , the false consensus effect, and the bias blind spot.

Perceptual illusions are endlessly fascinating and provide a microcosm of potentially faulty human perception. When we encounter these illusions, we initially believe we are seeing an accurate representation of reality only to be surprised by how easily our brains mislead us.

Inter-Group Conflict and Naive Realism

What happens when we extrapolate our perceptual shortcomings to large-scale human interaction? Too often, humans get stuck believing their view of the world is an objective reality. This, of course, leads to conflict with other humans who disagree, especially those we perceive to be part of an out-group . Naive realism leads us to reason that we see the world objectively—and that others do as well. When we encounter people who disagree with us on important matters, we tend to think they are uninformed, irrational, or biased.

Why does this happen? It is challenging and uncomfortable to confront our own understanding of the world, especially if we are unaware of our tendency for faulty interpretations of reality. Most people have likely not considered that their opinions about the world are filtered through their unique perceptual lens, which is fundamentally biased and based on past experiences.

How we perceive the world and important issues, from parenting to the political, is based on our perception. When we begin to understand that other people's experiences in the world vary greatly and influence how they interpret complex issues, we can begin to have a greater understanding of other points of view.

However, we tend to become more entrenched in our beliefs about our representations of reality when interacting with people in a different "tribe." Instead of seeking common ground—which can be an effective method to initiate belief change, we instead become more tribal and refute any information from our rival group.

What Can We Do?

The polarization in our modern world is widespread and appears to be increasing. Determining how to find commonalities between groups can feel impossible due to naive realism. Fascinatingly, researchers have uncovered a simple intervention that may promote greater understanding between members of rival groups.

Dr. Meytal Nasir (2014) and her colleagues set out to empirically investigate whether people could be more open to narratives of their adversaries (out-group) following an intervention that raises awareness regarding the concept of naive realism and the implications in the real world.

The researchers conducted their study within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an exemplar of a well-known intractable struggle. Their focus was to raise awareness of naive realism as a universal cognitive psychological bias that fuels adversaries to adhere to a collective narrative of the ingroup and reject the out-group narrative during conflict.

Results from the research indicated that the intervention—a short text describing naive realism and its implications—did produce an increased openness to adversary's narratives by raising the experimental group members' awareness of cognitive limitations. Fascinatingly, the intervention made no mention of the rival group or the specific conflict, yet still brought about positive change.

The Nasie research aligns with Dr. Lotto's commentary about how we can overcome our perceptual deficiencies.

By becoming aware of the principles by which your perceptual brain works, you can become an active participant in your own perceptions and in this way change them in the future. — Beau Lotto

Final Thoughts

A metacognitive strategy aimed at our perceptual system is a promising intervention for intractable disagreements between groups. While tribalism was certainly evolutionarily adaptive for humans thousands of years ago, current trends suggest it is detrimental and leading to deleterious consequences across the globe.

With knowledge regarding naive realism, we need to look beyond our own experiences and attempt to see the world with the eyes of others—especially those we perceive to be in out-groups. The insight uncovered with this new viewpoint may or may not move our positions on various issues, but as we navigate an ever-polarizing world of divisiveness—fueled by social media , it may be our only hope (sorry Obi-Wan).

Jessica Koehler, Ph.D., is an Associate Faculty Member in the University of Arizona Global Campus Psychology Department.

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Worldview Structure and Functions Essay

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World view stands for the individual’s perception of the world. World view does involve all the beliefs or philosophy on what we take the world to be in relation to ourselves. This does constitute one’s attitude, ideology and even one’s general outlook toward life.

People do ask themselves what human s are and what their purpose in life is. In discussing world views so many questions do arise. For example what is the world made up of? Does it involve assembling done by some sort of natural processes? Or is it created by a supreme being.

One’s worldviews do shape individuals a great deal. However, people’s world view is affected by several factors which include an array of inherited characteristics, other background situations and experiences, inculcated values and even habits. This therefore means that people’s worldviews do differ from one individual to the other.

One wonders what is the world and how did it originate. This question has proved quite challenging depending on one’s orientation. From what I feel, the world came to exist out of some supernatural power. This is despite the fact that there are other nations that try to explain the origin of the earth and the universe.

The world is a mass that is composed of masses of water soil and life. Scientists have come up with their suppositions on how the earth formed. According to them, it is believed that the world came into being about 4.5 billion years ago. It formed from a solidified dust and other gases when the sun was formed.

They believe that the earth was made of several ingredients including silicates and iron together with some other elements, some of which were radioactive. Since the earth was cold, some of the energy emanating from the reaction of the radioactive elements heats the earth, thereby making it warm.

The other constituents further react, creating depressions in the natural crust of the earth thereby causing natural basins of water, hills and volcanoes that led to the present terrain. There is also another scientific thought that further asserts that macro evolution played a very crucial role in the species on earth.

They believe that living things have evolved over time. This means that a horse some millions of years ago is not the same in features compared to the horse in existence now. It started with a small horse the size of a dog and changed in its stages of development into the horse that we know today.

But it is difficult to rely on this observation of changes. Some changes that can be observed do not change into totally different creatures altogether. For example I do not find it convincing claiming that reptiles could have possibly dropped their scaly skins and grew feathers to become birds.

There is another law of thermodynamics which simply stated that the development of the universe did proceed from a complete state of disorder to order and simple status to complex ones. But as is established, the second law of thermodynamics rules that there cannot be progression from disorder to order.

But still thermodynamics fall short of record of verification. For instance the law does not connect the missing links that do exist within the fossil record. If indeed macro –evolution took place over a period of billions of years on end, then the fossils of many creatures in their millions should provide evidence of some creatures evolving into other totally different creatures.

This therefore means that if birds actually evolve from reptiles then there should be fossils that reflect a creature that was half reptile and d half bird. The nature of our world is composed of materiality. This means nature has tangible things which are physical in nature. The nature has process. The process includes cycles and natural systems. Further, nature has got abstraction which is composed of ideas and expressions.

The materiality aspect of nature does make great sense to me. Nature is made of material physical things. For example, human beings do exist and so does water, trees, animals, rivers etc. This applies to what I see in the environment and this sends me to the point of how should we exist in nature.

This is crucial since it tells us that we are to co-exist with other things in this world. We should take ourselves to be independent. In this world we are co- inhabitants. One natural thing should not see itself as a substitution to the other. There is also a delicate balance that does exist and everything in nature has got its role and place in society.

The process part of nature cannot be ignored. Nature has got several processes taking place. These include nitrogen cycle, water cycle and many other biological cycles that do form the natural systems. These are in our environment in that should we tamper with any one of the cycles then nature suffers greatly and sometimes irreparably.

For example we do know that nature has got a wonderful way of cleaning itself for us. In fact there are many cycles that help the plants and animals to survive on earth. The cycles in essence do form micro worlds. Though the cycles do exist in the natural world, it is upon the inhabitants to provide this micro-world an opportunity to ‘live’.

Abstraction as an aspect of nature does reflect to us the existence of intangible issues such as ideas, expressions etc. Nature is not just physical; it is composed of harmonious philosophical issues that guide it. The human mind for example has perceptions, impressions and ideas. Remember these are not physical yet we cannot deny that they do exist. These do for instance bring sensations, unmeasured passions and other emotions.

Ideas on the other hand are images that get formed in the mind. These can be put into reality by implementing or setting out to concretize the image that is in the mind. For example I have had to view our backyard in a different way. This is an image that I have formed in my mind and can make it tangible if I so wish by going ahead and implementing the changes.

How our world is structured and how it functions. When we set out to investigate how our world is structured we are basically looking at the basic parts of the world is structured we are basically looking at the basic parts of the world and their attendant interrelationships. Further we look at the way those parts behave within a specific context or actual time dimension. According to me the world is structured in such a way that the past does greatly affect the present.

It is also structured in such a way that there is the unconscious reality on one side while on the other side there is invisible reality, objective reality and the visible reality. The construct of one’s perceived reality does greatly focus attention on many specific aspects of objective reality that eventually guides the way one perceives subjective reality. The world is thus viewed in what could be perceived through sciences, philosophy arts and even religion.

We human beings are not just observers to the world as some people claim. We are very important players in the universe and things here do not just happen around us. We are part of the creation. We are connected to this universe since our connectedness does give us fulfillment through things such as pursuit for pleasure, joy romance etc. on this earth.

Further we have the capacity to affect what is going through the world our actions. We come up with innovations and these innovations do have a way of helping or affecting the balance in the world. The things that join the universe like the particles of energy. We do share this and we get affected by things that happened in this universe before us and we get affected by those that will come after us.

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Bibliography

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July 1, 2010

Looks Can Deceive: Why Perception and Reality Don't Always Match Up

When you are facing a tricky task, your view of the world may not be as accurate as you think

By Christof Koch

ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience. I see a coffee mug on the table, reach for a sip and, lo and behold, the vessel’s handle is soon in my grasp as I gingerly imbibe the hot liquid. Or I see a chartreuse-yellow tennis ball on the lawn, pick it up and throw it. Reassuringly, my dog appears to share my veridical view of reality: she chases the ball and triumphantly catches it between her jaws.

That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit. If you routinely misperceive or even hallucinate and act on those misapprehensions, you won’t survive long in a world filled with dangers whose avoidance requires accurate distance and speed assessments and rapid reactions. Whether you are diving into rocky waters or driving on a narrow, two-lane road with cars whizzing by in the opposite direction, small mistakes can be lethal.

You probably believe that your eyes register high-fidelity information about the absolute size, speed and distance of visible objects and that you respond based on these impartial data. But although we build robots in this manner—equipping them with sensors and computers to plumb the metric properties of their environments—evolution has taken a more complex route.

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As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two vision systems that work in parallel. Both are fed by the same two sensors, the eyeballs, yet they serve different functions. One system is responsible for visual perception and is necessary for identifying objects—such as approaching cars and potential mates—independent of their apparent size or location in our visual field. The other is responsible for action: it transforms visual input into the movements of our eyes, hands and legs. We consciously experience only the former, but we depend for our survival on both.

When driving in the mountains, have you ever noticed a discrepancy between the slope described on the yellow road sign and your sense that the incline is actually much steeper? Psychologist Dennis R. Proffitt of the University of Virginia and his then graduate student Jessica Witt did. Being scientists and not philosophers, they designed an experiment to find out why. Proffitt and Witt stood at the base of hills on campus and asked passing students to estimate their steepness in two ways. Subjects had to align the diameter line on a flat disk to the slant of the hill. They also were asked to place the palm of one hand on a movable board that was mounted on a tripod and then, without looking at that hand, to adjust the board’s slant until they felt it matched that of the hill.

In the first part of the test, which relied on visual cues alone, subjects badly overestimated, interpreting a 31-degree slant as a much steeper, 50-degree one. But when people’s eyes were guiding their hands, subjects judged accurately, tilting the board an appropriate amount. Perhaps even more striking was the finding that people’s tendency to overestimate on the strictly visual part of the test increased by more than a third when they had just run an exhausting race—but the hand estimates were unaffected. The same discrepancy occurred when subjects wore a heavy backpack, were elderly, or were in poor physical condition or declining health.

In another variant of the experiment, Proffitt had subjects stand on top of a hill on either a skateboard or a wooden box the same height as the skateboard. Participants were instructed to look down the hill and judge, both visually and manually, its grade. They were also asked how afraid they felt to descend the hill. Fearful participants standing on the skateboard judged the hill to be steeper than did the braver souls standing on the box. Yet the visually guided action measurement was unaffected by fear.

Proffitt argues that perception is not fixed: it is flexible, reflecting a person’s physiological state. Your conscious perception of slant depends on your current ability to walk up or down hills—hard work that should not be undertaken lightly. If you are tired, frail, scared or carrying a load, your assessment of the hill—the one that guides your actions—will differ from what you see. Not by choice, but by design. It is the way you are wired.

The Witt-Proffitt team published another report on the observation, well known in sports lore, that baseball players perceive the ball to be larger when they are hitting well and smaller when they are on a losing streak. Since then, Witt, now a professor at Purdue University, along with her student Travis Dorsch, has pursued this intriguing link between how success (or lack of it) in a task affects one’s perception of the world.

In their experiment, 23 volunteers had to kick an American football through the field goal from the 10-yard line. After a warm-up, participants were asked to judge the height and width of the goal by adjusting a handheld, scaled-down model of the goal made out of PVC pipes. They then each performed 10 kicks. Immediately after the final kick, participants repeated the perceptual measurement.

The result was striking. Before kicking, both groups had the same perception of the size of the goal (incidentally, an inaccurate one: everybody underestimated its actual width-to-height ratio). But after 10 kicks, the poor performers (those who scored two or fewer successful kicks) saw the goal as about 10 percent narrower than they had before, whereas the good kickers (those who scored three or more) perceived the goal to be about 10 percent wider. How well you have performed over the past few minutes influences the way you see the world! Not just metaphorically, but on a physiological level—it changes your actual perceptions.

After more data mining, the two psychologists discovered that the people who missed the goal because they tended to kick the ball too short perceived the crossbar as being higher than did their more successful peers, whereas those who missed because they kicked wide judged the upright field posts to be narrower.

So by now you may be thinking: How convenient! The perceptual system offers us self-serving justifications for bad performance. But there is likely some value here, evolutionarily speaking: if people perceive the goal as higher or smaller than it actually is, they will aim more precisely the next time. What happens in football also holds for softball and golf, Witt and her colleagues have found—and, most likely, for life in general.

Our conscious perception of the world, though relatively stable, is not static. We are incapable of being fully objective, even in our most mundane observations and impressions. Our awareness of the objects around us is informed and fine-tuned by any number of transient factors—our strength and energy levels, our sense of confidence, our fears and desires. Being human means seeing the world through your own, constantly shifting, lens.

Christof Koch is meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle and the chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, as well as author of the forthcoming Then I am Myself the World – What Consciousness is and How to Expand It . He serves on Scientific American's board of advisers.

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perception , in humans , the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percepts suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual process; theories of perceiving then can be developed on the basis of these inferences. Because the perceptual process is not itself public or directly observable (except to the perceiver himself, whose percepts are given directly in experience), the validity of perceptual theories can be checked only indirectly. That is, predictions derived from theory are compared with appropriate empirical data, quite often through experimental research.

Historically, systematic thought about perceiving was the province of philosophy . Indeed, perceiving remains of interest to philosophers, and many issues about the process that were originally raised by philosophers are still of current concern. As a scientific enterprise, however, the investigation of perception has especially developed as part of the larger discipline of psychology .

Philosophical interest in perception stems largely from questions about the sources and validity of what is called human knowledge (see epistemology ). Epistemologists ask whether a real, physical world exists independently of human experience and, if so, how its properties can be learned and how the truth or accuracy of that experience can be determined. They also ask whether there are innate ideas or whether all experience originates through contact with the physical world, mediated by the sense organs . For the most part, psychology bypasses such questions in favour of problems that can be handled by its special methods. The remnants of such philosophical questions, however, do remain; researchers are still concerned, for example, with the relative contributions of innate and learned factors to the perceptual process.

Such fundamental philosophical assertions as the existence of a physical world, however, are taken for granted among most of those who study perception from a scientific perspective. Typically, researchers in perception simply accept the apparent physical world particularly as it is described in those branches of physics concerned with electromagnetic energy , optics, and mechanics. The problems they consider relate to the process whereby percepts are formed from the interaction of physical energy (for example, light) with the perceiving organism. Of further interest is the degree of correspondence between percepts and the physical objects to which they ordinarily relate. How accurately, for example, does the visually perceived size of an object match its physical size as measured (e.g., with a yardstick)?

Questions of the latter sort imply that perceptual experiences typically have external referents and that they are meaningfully organized, most often as objects. Meaningful objects, such as trees, faces, books, tables, and dogs, are normally seen rather than separately perceived as the dots, lines, colours, and other elements of which they are composed. In the language of Gestalt psychologists, immediate human experience is of organized wholes ( Gestalten ), not of collections of elements.

A major goal of Gestalt theory in the 20th century was to specify the brain processes that might account for the organization of perception. Gestalt theorists, chief among them the German-U.S. psychologist and philosopher, the founder of Gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer and the German-U.S. psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler , rejected the earlier assumption that perceptual organization was the product of learned relationships ( associations ), the constituent elements of which were called simple sensations . Although Gestaltists agreed that simple sensations logically could be understood to comprise organized percepts, they argued that percepts themselves were basic to experience. One does not perceive so many discrete dots (as simple sensations), for example; the percept is that of a dotted line.

Without denying that learning can play some role in perception, many theorists took the position that perceptual organization reflects innate properties of the brain itself. Indeed, perception and brain functions were held by Gestaltists to be formally identical (or isomorphic), so much so that to study perception is to study the brain. Much contemporary research in perception is directed toward inferring specific features of brain function from such behaviour as the reports ( introspections ) people give of their sensory experiences. More and more such inferences are gratifyingly being matched with physiological observations of the brain itself.

Many investigators relied heavily on introspective reports, treating them as though they were objective descriptions of public events. Serious doubts were raised in the 1920s about this use of introspection by the U.S. psychologist John B. Watson and others, who argued that it yielded only subjective accounts and that percepts are inevitably private experiences and lack the objectivity commonly required of scientific disciplines . In response to objections about subjectivism, there arose an approach known as behaviourism that restricts its data to objective descriptions or measurements of the overt behaviour of organisms other than the experimenter himself. Verbal reports are not excluded from consideration as long as they are treated strictly as public (objective) behaviour and are not interpreted as literal, reliable descriptions of the speaker’s private (subjective, introspective) experience. The behaviouristic approach does not rule out the scientific investigation of perception; instead, it modestly relegates perceptual events to the status of inferences. Percepts of others manifestly cannot be observed, though their properties can be inferred from observable behaviour (verbal and nonverbal).

One legacy of behaviourism in contemporary research on perception is a heavy reliance on very simple responses (often nonverbal), such as the pressing of a button or a lever. One advantage of this Spartan approach is that it can be applied to organisms other than man and to human infants (who also cannot give verbal reports). This restriction does not, however, cut off the researcher from the rich supply of hypotheses about perception that derive from his own introspections. Behaviourism does not proscribe sources of hypotheses; it simply specifies that only objective data are to be used in testing those hypotheses.

Behaviouristic methods for studying perception are apt to call minimally on the complex, subjective, so-called higher mental processes that seem characteristic of adult human beings; they thus tend to dehumanize perceptual theory and research. Thus, when attention is limited to objective stimuli and responses, parallels can readily be drawn between perceiving (by living organisms) and information processing (by such devices as electronic computers). Indeed, it is from this information-processing approach that some of the more intriguing theoretical contributions (e.g., abstract models of perception) are currently being made. It is expected that such practical applications as the development of artificial “eyes” for the blind may emerge from these man–machine analogies . Computer-based machines that can discriminate among visual patterns already have been constructed, such as those that “read” the code numbers on bank checks.

Perception and Play: How Children View the World

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Smith, an Indiana University Bloomington (IU) psychological scientist renowned for her studies on the development of language and object recognition in infants and young children, was a keynote speaker at the 2017 International Convention of Psychological Science in Vienna. Her speech, “How Infants Break Into Language,” focused on the intersection of object identification and linguistic learning in children between the ages of 3 weeks and 24 months.

Smith has steadily pursued new ways of examining the infant brain and body, especially as they relate to learning both language acquisition and object cognition. Her current line of research explores the role of environment in young children’s growth processes, with special focus on pivotal developmental time periods and the mechanisms of change that play crucial roles during those periods.

“We do not yet have a theory or a computational understanding of the implications of the ordered sequence of experiences that babies create for themselves,” Smith said, noting that babies have simultaneously evolving developmental systems. “What the brain does determines what the body does, and what the body does changes the environment … these changes that we make in the world come back to the brain through the body.”

Smith has made it a priority to analyze the dynamics of the interactions between a child’s brain, body, and surrounding environment. These interactions, she says, can have tremendous effects on how kids learn to speak and to identify specific items in their fields of view, thereby shedding light on the developmental pathways of both linguistic development and object learning. To achieve this goal, she has conducted several studies examining babies wearing head cameras. The Home-View Project, an initiative developed with support from the National Science Foundation, thus far has gathered data from 75 children ranging in age from 3 weeks to 24 months, with 4 to 6 hours of head-camera video recordings for each child.

The Eyes Have It

A general rule of thumb when studying sensorimotor systems, Smith said, is that “when you have people moving in the world — be they babies or be they adults — they tend to view the world with heads and eyes aligned.” That is, when we see something we truly want to focus on (rather than just glance at), we turn our entire head in the direction of the object; this movement, Smith explained, takes approximately 500 ms. However, children at different ages go about this process in different ways. Three-week-old infants can see only what is held in front of them and therefore focus their gaze directly ahead, while 1-year-old toddlers are “driving new kinds of flow and optic information, and when that movement starts … that actually is driving very important changes in the visual system.”

A baby’s increased ability to move its head (and subsequently its entire body) results in a correspondingly increased visual field, Smith noted. Data from head cameras attached to infants showed that they viewed faces 15 minutes out of every hour — an extremely high proportion of the time they were awake. They also saw those faces at close ranges of approximately 2 ft., likely because parents were leaning in quite closely to look at their children at that age.

One-year-old children, however, saw faces only 6 minutes per hour and also viewed them from farther away, instead focusing more of their attention on hands and objects.

“It’s faces that decline with age, not people in view,” she explained. “When a 2-year-old is looking at somebody’s body in the natural viewing, it’s unlikely to be a face, but when a 3-month-old has a body in the view, it’s likely to be a face.”

This creates a systematic shift for which body part is most salient to a child’s physical learning experience because of the way kids perceive hand function at that age: Whether a child is an infant or a toddler, 70% of the time they spend looking at hands, those hands are holding objects.

Playing With Perception

To zoom in on this critical developmental period, Smith, in collaboration with her colleague APS Fellow Chen Yu, conducted a multisensory project that used head cameras (or head-mounted eye trackers for infants), motion sensors, audio recordings, and multiple room cameras. In the larger project, they have now recruited nearly 200 children from 9 to 36 months of age, as well as one parent of each child. By closely examining the interactions that arose during parent–infant play, specifically as it related to objects, Smith hoped to glean insights into the ways kids learned about language and object identification at different ages.

They found that in the first 2 years of a child’s life, objects came into and out of view rapidly and that one object usually was much closer to the child’s eyes than were others (suggesting that the parent had perhaps held it in front of the child’s face). Equally as important, the parent often named the object that was largest in the child’s view. For Smith, this begged the question: “Is this type of play an optimal moment for learning object names?”

Smith and Yu gave the parents six objects with specific names to use while playing with their children. They were not told to teach the children the names of the items; nor were they told the children would be tested after play (this assured the parents would not intentionally try to turn the session into a lesson). After the 1.5-minute session, the researchers measured the children’s knowledge of each object twice by presenting the child with three options and asking them to choose one. If a child chose the right object, Smith and her colleagues reexamined the dynamics of the play session, reviewing material from 10 seconds prior to the naming event to 10 seconds after the naming event.

They found that successful object recognition occurred when an object was physically close to, and centered on, a baby’s face. “Toddlers learn objects names when the referent is visually salient, bigger in the view, [and] more centered than the competitors,” Smith explained. “This is a direct consequence … of how toddlers’ bodies work.”

In addition, the experimenters discovered that naming moments were likely to happen when babies were holding the object themselves and when their heads were stable (i.e., focused on the object). “What all this means is that in the toddler, visual attention and learning involves the whole sensorimotor system,” Smith said. “It emerges in the real-time coupling and self-organization of head, eyes, and hands. At this point, learning object names is about the coordinated focus of eye, head, and hands, the stabilized visual attention that brings about, and the reduction of visual competition that holding an object brings about.”

Smith is encouraged by these consistent findings and believes they could be relevant for researchers seeking to delve more deeply into the intersection of language learning and object cognition of young children. She explained that each age provides novel insights into this process: When children are 18 months old, they learn things completely differently than they did when they were younger (e.g., they are coordinated enough to grasp and hold objects, thereby encouraging encourages parents to name them).

“Development also brings the accomplishments of the past forward,” Smith concluded. “What happened earlier will shape what happens later.”

Teaching: Ethical Research to Help Romania’s Abandoned Children 

An early intervention experiment in Bucharest can introduce students to the importance of responsive caregiving during human development.

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Podcast: In her final column as APS President, Alison Gopnik makes the case for more effectively and creatively caring for vulnerable humans at either end of life.

Communicating Psychological Science: The Lifelong Consequences of Early Language Skills

“When families are informed about the importance of conversational interaction and are provided training, they become active communicators and directly contribute to reducing the word gap (Leung et al., 2020).”

Privacy Overview

Chapter 4: Sensation and Perception

Sensation and perception.

Sensation and perception are two separate processes that are very closely related. Sensation is input about the physical world obtained by our sensory receptors, and perception is the process by which the brain selects, organizes, and interprets these sensations. In other words, senses are the physiological basis of perception. Perception of the same senses may vary from one person to another because each person’s brain interprets stimuli differently based on that individual’s learning, memory, emotions, and expectations.

Video 1. Sensation and Perception explains the differences between these two processes.

What does it mean to sense something? Sensory receptors are specialized neurons that respond to specific types of stimuli. When sensory information is detected by a sensory receptor, sensation has occurred. For example, light that enters the eye causes chemical changes in cells that line the back of the eye. These cells relay messages, in the form of action potentials (as you learned when studying biopsychology), to the central nervous system. The conversion from sensory stimulus energy to action potential is known as transduction .

You have probably known since elementary school that we have five senses: vision, hearing (audition), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation), and touch (somatosensation). It turns out that this notion of five senses is oversimplified. We also have sensory systems that provide information about balance (the vestibular sense), body position and movement (proprioception and kinesthesia), pain (nociception), and temperature (thermoception).

The sensitivity of a given sensory system to the relevant stimuli can be expressed as an absolute threshold. Absolute threshold refers to the minimum amount of stimulus energy that must be present for the stimulus to be detected 50% of the time. Another way to think about this is by asking how dim can a light be or how soft can a sound be and still be detected half of the time. The sensitivity of our sensory receptors can be quite amazing. It has been estimated that on a clear night, the most sensitive sensory cells in the back of the eye can detect a candle flame 30 miles away (Okawa & Sampath, 2007). Under quiet conditions, the hair cells (the receptor cells of the inner ear) can detect the tick of a clock 20 feet away (Galanter, 1962).

Video 2.  Absolute Threshold of Sensation

It is also possible for us to get messages that are presented below the threshold for conscious awareness—these are called subliminal messages . A stimulus reaches a physiological threshold when it is strong enough to excite sensory receptors and send nerve impulses to the brain: this is an absolute threshold. A message below that threshold is said to be subliminal: we receive it, but we are not consciously aware of it. Therefore, the message is sensed, but for whatever reason, it has not been selected for processing in working or short-term memory. Over the years there has been a great deal of speculation about the use of subliminal messages in advertising, rock music, and self-help audio programs. Research evidence shows that in laboratory settings, people can process and respond to information outside of awareness. But this does not mean that we obey these messages like zombies; in fact, hidden messages have little effect on behavior outside the laboratory (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980; Rensink, 2004; Nelson, 2008; Radel, Sarrazin, Legrain, & Gobancé, 2009; Loersch, Durso, & Petty, 2013).

Dig Deeper: Unconscious Perception

Figure 2 . Priming can be used to improve intellectual test performance. Research subjects primed with the stereotype of a professor – a sort of intellectual role model – outperformed those primed with an anti-intellectual stereotype. [Photo: Jeremy Wilburn]

Absolute thresholds are generally measured under incredibly controlled conditions in situations that are optimal for sensitivity. Sometimes, we are more interested in how much difference in stimuli is required to detect a difference between them. This is known as the just noticeable difference (jnd) or difference threshold . Unlike the absolute threshold, the difference threshold changes depending on the stimulus intensity. As an example, imagine yourself in a very dark movie theater. If an audience member were to receive a text message on her cell phone which caused her screen to light up, chances are that many people would notice the change in illumination in the theater. However, if the same thing happened in a brightly lit arena during a basketball game, very few people would notice. The cell phone brightness does not change, but its ability to be detected as a change in illumination varies dramatically between the two contexts. Ernst Weber proposed this theory of change in difference threshold in the 1830s, and it has become known as Weber’s law : The difference threshold is a constant fraction of the original stimulus, as the example illustrates. It is the idea that bigger stimuli require larger differences to be noticed. For example, it will be much harder for your friend to reliably tell the difference between 10 and 11 lbs. (or 5 versus 5.5 kg) than it is for 1 and 2 lbs.

Video 3.  Weber’s Law and Thresholds 

While our sensory receptors are constantly collecting information from the environment, it is ultimately how we interpret that information that affects how we interact with the world. Perception refers to the way sensory information is organized, interpreted, and consciously experienced. Perception involves both bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to the fact that perceptions are built from sensory input. On the other hand, how we interpret those sensations is influenced by our available knowledge, our experiences, and our thoughts. This is called top-down processing .

Video 4.  Bottom-up versus Top-down Processing.

Look at the shape in Figure 3 below. Seen alone, your brain engages in bottom-up processing. There are two thick vertical lines and three thin horizontal lines. There is no context to give it a specific meaning, so there is no top-down processing involved.

Figure 3 . What is this image? Without any context, you must use bottom-up processing.

Now, look at the same shape in two different contexts. Surrounded by sequential letters, your brain expects the shape to be a letter and to complete the sequence. In that context, you perceive the lines to form the shape of the letter “B.”

Figure 4 . With top-down processing, you use context to give meaning to this image.

Surrounded by numbers, the same shape now looks like the number “13.”

Figure 5 . With top-down processing, you use context to give meaning to this image.

When given a context, your perception is driven by your cognitive expectations. Now you are processing the shape in a top-down fashion.

One way to think of this concept is that sensation is a physical process, whereas perception is psychological. For example, upon walking into a kitchen and smelling the scent of baking cinnamon rolls, the sensation is the scent receptors detecting the odor of cinnamon, but the perception may be “Mmm, this smells like the bread Grandma used to bake when the family gathered for holidays.”

Although our perceptions are built from sensations, not all sensations result in perception. In fact, we often don’t perceive stimuli that remain relatively constant over prolonged periods of time. This is known as sensory adaptation . Imagine entering a classroom with an old analog clock. Upon first entering the room, you can hear the ticking of the clock; as you begin to engage in conversation with classmates or listen to your professor greet the class, you are no longer aware of the ticking. The clock is still ticking, and that information is still affecting sensory receptors of the auditory system. The fact that you no longer perceive the sound demonstrates sensory adaptation and shows that while closely associated, sensation and perception are different.

Attention and Perception

There is another factor that affects sensation and perception: attention. Attention plays a significant role in determining what is sensed versus what is perceived. Imagine you are at a party full of music, chatter, and laughter. You get involved in an interesting conversation with a friend, and you tune out all the background noise. If someone interrupted you to ask what song had just finished playing, you would probably be unable to answer that question.

One experiment that demonstrates this phenomenon of inattentional blindness  asked participants to observe images moving across a computer screen. They were instructed to focus on either white or black objects, disregarding the other color. When a red cross passed across the screen, about one-third of subjects did not notice it (Most, Simons, Scholl, & Chabris, 2000).

Link to Learning

Video 5.  Test your perceptual abilities.

Figure 6 . Nearly one third of participants in a study did not notice that a red cross passed on the screen because their attention was focused on the black or white figures. (credit: Cory Zanker)

Motivations, Expectations, and Perception

Motivation can also affect perception. Have you ever been expecting a really important phone call and, while taking a shower, you think you hear the phone ringing, only to discover that it is not? If so, then you have experienced how motivation to detect a meaningful stimulus can shift our ability to discriminate between a true sensory stimulus and background noise. The ability to identify a stimulus when it is embedded in a distracting background is called signal detection theory . This might also explain why a mother is awakened by a quiet murmur from her baby but not by other sounds that occur while she is asleep. Signal detection theory has practical applications, such as increasing air traffic controller accuracy. Controllers need to be able to detect planes among many signals (blips) that appear on the radar screen and follow those planes as they move through the sky. In fact, the original work of the researcher who developed signal detection theory was focused on improving the sensitivity of air traffic controllers to plane blips (Swets, 1964).

Video 6.   Signal Detection Theory. 

Our perceptions can also be affected by our beliefs, values, prejudices, expectations, and life experiences. As you will see later in this module, individuals who are deprived of the experience of binocular vision during critical periods of development have trouble perceiving depth (Fawcett, Wang, & Birch, 2005). The shared experiences of people within a given cultural context can have pronounced effects on perception. For example, Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits (1963) published the results of a multinational study in which they demonstrated that individuals from Western cultures were more prone to experience certain types of visual illusions than individuals from non-Western cultures, and vice versa. One such illusion that Westerners were more likely to experience was the Müller-Lyer illusion: the lines appear to be different lengths, but they are actually the same length.

Figure 7 . In the Müller-Lyer illusion, lines appear to be different lengths although they are identical. (a) Arrows at the ends of lines may make the line on the right appear longer, although the lines are the same length. (b) When applied to a three-dimensional image, the line on the right again may appear longer although both black lines are the same length.

These perceptual differences were consistent with differences in the types of environmental features experienced on a regular basis by people in a given cultural context. People in Western cultures, for example, have a perceptual context of buildings with straight lines, what Segall’s study called a carpentered world (Segall et al., 1966). In contrast, people from certain non-Western cultures with an uncarpentered view, such as the Zulu of South Africa, whose villages are made up of round huts arranged in circles, are less susceptible to this illusion (Segall et al., 1999). It is not just vision that is affected by cultural factors. Indeed, research has demonstrated that the ability to identify an odor and rate its pleasantness and its intensity, varies cross-culturally (Ayabe-Kanamura, Saito, Distel, Martínez-Gómez, & Hudson, 1998).

Children described as thrill-seekers are more likely to show taste preferences for intense sour flavors (Liem, Westerbeek, Wolterink, Kok, & de Graaf, 2004), which suggests that basic aspects of personality might affect perception. Furthermore, individuals who hold positive attitudes toward reduced-fat foods are more likely to rate foods labeled as reduced-fat as tasting better than people who have less positive attitudes about these products (Aaron, Mela, & Evans, 1994).

Think It Over

Think about a time when you failed to notice something around you because your attention was focused elsewhere. If someone pointed it out, were you surprised that you hadn’t noticed it right away?

• North, A & Hargreaves, David & McKendrick, Jennifer. (1999). The Influence of In-Store Music on Wine Selections. Journal of Applied Psychology. 84. 271-276. 10.1037/0021-9010.84.2.271. ↵
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• Personal Worldview, Spirituality and Afterlife Words: 936
• Spirituality and Personal Worldview Inventory Words: 838
• Personal Worldview Inventory, Theory and Types Words: 878
• Unique Worldview: Personal Worldview Definition Words: 858
• Personal Worldview Inventory – Philosophy Words: 850
• Personal Worldview: Different Approaches Words: 936

Perception of the World: Personal Worldview Inventory

Spirituality and philosophical concepts, seven basic worldview questions.

Although there have been several definitions of worldview, it is evident that a world view involves a system of beliefs. It can also be defined as an individual’s perspective or attitude about the world. A worldview is a particular perception and interpretation of the world. (Hutchinson, 2013).This essay, therefore, will attempt to explain the personal worldview and answer questions relating to the personal worldview. In addition to that, it will also describe the meaning of spiritualism, pluralism, scientism, and postmodernism.

In the recent past, many theorists have argued over the meaning of Spirituality. Moreover, they have denied the existence of spirituality if health is auguring that spirituality cannot bring healing to an individual. Nonetheless, most of them have agreed to the fact that there is a significant connection between the body, soul, and mind. According to Souza et. al, (2015), spirituality involves philosophical nature behaviours such as love and hope. They assert that spirituality provides a meaning for peoples’ lives because it produces faith.

Culture is a by-product of its worldviews. This means that their values and practice are in tandem with their beliefs. Concerning religion, different societies practice what they value and believe in. However, pluralism states that all religions and cultures are correct despite their varied opinions on various aspects. My understanding of the concept of pluralism is that it accepts diversity and tries to equalize different beliefs and values.

Over the years, there have been conflicts between the Christians and scientists. Christians believe in the story of creation and that Adam and Eve first inhabited the world. On the contrary, scientists believe that human beings evolved from ape-like creatures. Scientism is a belief that real knowledge is discovered through science. (Christin, 2013).They assume that the only true way of finding facts about something is through conducting scientific research.

Postmodernism concept rejects the worldview as well as Scientism. Scientific knowledge focuses on the scientists’ perception. (Sharman, 2015).Postmodernism is defined as incredulity from traditional narratives. (Dahlern, 2012).It asserts that there should be new forms of sociological thinking and that nothing is absolute in reality.

What is prime reality?

A prime reality is the infinite. I believe in God who is the creator of heaven and earth.

What is the nature of the world around you?

The world around me includes all the things that God created and that includes: creatures, man, rivers, heavens and the earth.

What is a human being?

A human being is a complex machine who was created in the image and the likeness of God. I think that human beings possess unique abilities compared to other animals. For instance, they have powerful minds and are able to think independently. In other words, they are sober and unique.

What happens to a person at death?

According to my personal worldview, I believe that there is life after death and as the Bible says, God will judge each human being according to the life that one has lived. However, postmodernism does not share this view; on the contary, it believes that each individual is responsible for their lives rather than a Higher Being. On the other hand, Scientism states that there is no life after death and that death does not exist.

Why is it possible to know anything at all?

It is possible to know everything because God created us in His Image and Likeness. That means that we have similar mindsets and this makes us know things like Him. Postmodernism asserts that we can never know everything in this world. Our knowledge of the world around us is rather limited. The reasoning behind postmodernists is because the reality is not clear and therefore as human beings, we cannot know everything. In Scientism the universe knows everything, and so a human being cannot know anything.

How do people know what is right or wrong?

People are able to know what is wrong based on teachings from the Bible. The Bible articulates on instructions to follow. God clearly writes that those instructions are for us to follow and they state what is wrong and right. According to postmodernists, individuals or cultures set their own moral standards. They determine what is wrong and everyone can abide with those guidelines. When one abides by them, he is considered to be right, and on the contrary, when he does not, he considered to be wrong.

What is the meaning of human history?

The history of mankind means that people follow a certain religion and in this case, it is creation. God created human beings, and they should live for Him.

It is evident that my personal worldview in based in Spirituality and a firm belief in God. Pluralism, Postmodernism and Scientism do not seem to have answers to all questions. In fact, they seem to assume some of them. Therefore, it is critical that they adopt the stance of Spiritualism to find answers to all problems.

Christin, C. (2013). Distinguishing between science and scientism. Integral, 11(2).

Dahlern, N. (2012). The ethical foundations of postmodernity–communicative reality and relative individuals in theory and North American literature. Web.

Hutchinson, N. (2013). World views, a story about how the world works: Their significance in the Australian Curriculum: Geography. Geographical Education, 38(5), 12- 26

Sharman, A. (2015). The impact of controversy on the production of scientific knowledge (No. 207). Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy. 28(5), 19-20.

Souza, V. D. M., Frizzo, H. C. F., Paiva, M. H. P. D., Bousso, R. S., & Santos, Á. D. S. (2015). Spirituality, religion and personal beliefs of adolescents with cancer. Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem, 68(5), 791-796.

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A Virtual Life: How Social Media Changes Our Perceptions

Social media offers connectivity, but it is important to find a balance. Learn about how it is changing our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world by participating in one of our Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Programs.

In social psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s, Ph.D., 1991 book, “ The Saturated Self “, he warned of an Orwellian world where technology might saturate human beings to the point of “multiphrenia,” a fragmented version of the self that is pulled in so many directions the individual would be lost. “I am linked, therefore I am,” he famously said, playing on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Little did Dr. Gergen know how dead-on his prediction would be.

Because as our society sits here more than 20 years later with our tablets and cell phones and electronic gadgets—seduced by the lure of the blue light glow—we have never been more linked, more connected, and more bound to a virtual reality that many of us can no longer live without.

“Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world ‘unplugged’ does not signify, does not satisfy. We build a following online and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We re-create ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances.

A virtual life is shiny and bright. It’s where you post your prettiest pictures and tell all your best news.

Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone,” writes licensed clinical psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle , Ph.D., in her best-selling tome,  “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other.” Founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, the book is the third in a series on the effects of technology on society and culminates 15 years of research on the digital terrain.

The long-term psychological impact of social media on individuals and their sense of “self” remains to be seen. But there is one thing we do know. Our daily lives have been digitized, tracked, and tied up in metrics. Our real selves have split into online avatars and profile pictures and status updates. And while social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are powerful tools that have the potential to build communities, connect relatives in far-flung places, leverage careers, and even elect presidents of the U.S., they are also unleashing myriad complex psychological issues that have altered our collective sense of reality.

A virtual life is shiny and bright. It’s where you post your prettiest pictures and tell all your best news. “In games where we expect to play an avatar, we end up being ourselves in the most revealing ways; on social networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be,” Dr. Turkle writes. But is it real? More importantly, is it healthy?

The Unreal World

Ali Jazayeri, Ph.D., associate professor of clinical psychology at The Chicago School’s L.A. Campus , thinks there are clear and present dangers that can’t be ignored.

“I definitely think that social media has had a very deep impact on our lives. The world that we see on Facebook and other social media sites is not a true and real world. It’s a creation of people,” Dr. Jazayeri explains. “Among other dangers that Facebook might possibly pose in our lives, such as lack of privacy, is this habit of always comparing ourselves to others. People, when they are happy, post a lot of happy things. But when I’m not happy I will consciously, or unconsciously, compare myself to others. As a result, I create a world that is not a true world because I imagine that everybody is happy in that world, except me.”

While each social media site has its own personality and purpose, the wildly popular Facebook with its estimated one billion active monthly users has gained the most attention from psychologists for its potential to distort an individual’s sense of self and sense of other people. The magnetism of social media in conjunction with the effects on reality while diminishing individuality comes with significant consequences.

What concerns Jazayeri most, from a psychologist’s perspective, is the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities.

A 2011 clinical report on “ The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families ,” published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was one of the first to raise the issue of “Facebook depression” among young people worried that they weren’t accumulating enough “friends” or “likes” in response to their status updates.

Around the same time, Cecilie Andreassen, Ph.D., and her colleagues at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway published a piece about their work with the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale in the journal Psychological Reports. And this all came on the heels of somewhat controversial news that the American Psychiatric Association was considering the addition of “ Internet addiction ” in an appendix to the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

What concerns Dr. Jazayeri most, from a psychologist’s perspective, is the danger of slipping too far into a virtual world and losing a sense of real life, real self, and real priorities. 

“Some people use this social media to create something that they are not,” he says, explaining that the virtual world can distract people so much from their real lives that they either forget who they are or become so involved in the reality they’ve created that they don’t want to work on their own issues. Social media can ultimately create a false sense of reality.

“Instead of me trying to deal with things I don’t like about myself, I will go online and present myself in the way I’d like to be seen, without any changes to me,” Dr. Jazayeri says. “It’s dangerous, and very deceptive. If you look at the history of psychology, we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to help people know themselves better, deal with their shortcomings, deal with things they don’t want to have, so we have a very reality oriented atmosphere in our Western psychology.”

Dr. Jazayeri worries that an overreliance on this virtual world is undermining all the progress human beings have made in addressing real-life problems. Social media allows an escape from reality to the point of neglecting real-world issues and creating a false reality. 

“As psychologists, we have theories based on the reality of patient’s lives. Our goal is to help people try to see themselves for the reality of what they are,” he continues. “But if we perceive that everyone else is perfect, then we push ourselves to become someone that we are not, and then we get frustrated, and then we get depressed.”

Like Dr. Turkle and other experts, he is careful to also note the value of such sites for helping people do everything from reconnect with old friends and family members to rallying community members during times of national tragedy or disaster. However, he believes we need limits—that as a society we need to be vigilant about taking time to unplug, to disconnect, and to reconnect with ourselves and our real lives.

In a statement that echoes Dr. Gergen’s words from 1991, Dr. Jazayeri concludes by saying, “Someday, I hope we will appreciate that the computer is not a substitute for a real human being.”

Consciousness, Collected

Eleazar Eusebio, Psy.D., formerly an assistant professor in the School of Professional Psychology at The Chicago School, has been fascinated with the concept of virtual worlds and social media since the early chat rooms of the 1990s.

“Something I like to talk about a lot in psychotherapy are the various dimensions of consciousness,” he says. “It can get really psychoanalytical if you’re going to look at what kind of behavior people are putting out there. I have been studying Jungian analysis, and I do find it interesting, especially when you look at personality types.”

Whether your inner nature tends toward paranoia, narcissism, manic, depressive, or even melodramatic behaviors, Dr. Eusebio says these things unconsciously manifest themselves, rather publicly, in an online setting.

As any Facebook user knows, there are “types” among almost anyone’s collection of “friends.”

“I don’t want to psychopathologize everybody who’s online, but I think it’s possible to take a quasi-diagnostic look at it when you examine what people write or how they interact online,” Dr. Eusebio says.

Of all the social media sites, he says Facebook is a place where almost every personality type can be found and analyzed. “This is the best modern example I’ve come across of what I’ve been calling the collective unconscious personified. How do we choose to present ourselves to this world? In addition, at what point do we stop?”

As any Facebook user knows, there are “types” among almost anyone’s collection of “friends.” Some use the site solely to promote their business or career. Others take the opportunity to share political opinions, while others post several status updates per day about things as banal as what they had for breakfast or what’s on the dinner table. Some are a series of check-ins at restaurants, clubs, museums, and airports. There are braggarts and complainers; cheerleaders and naysayers.

“Online groups tend to triangulate people. This environment will provide you the tool to display any kind of psycho-pathology,” Dr. Eusebio adds. “Cyberspace alone is a psychological extension of our own intrapsychic world. We all have various dimensions of our unconscious. And with social media, you can really dive into people’s lives. The danger is we throw our reputations out there, and we put avatars attached to who we are.”

While he says most adults have the foresight to screen their online behavior—to think twice about who’s viewing their status updates, photo albums, and check-ins,the more compulsive types often do not, especially if the posts are made in the heat of the moment, late at night.

“One notion we might overlook is whether we would be saying the same things or sending the same messages if we were face to face in a coffee shop,” Dr. Eusebio wonders.

Or, even scarier, a job interview.

The Professional Fibber

John Fowler received an M.A. in Psychology at The Chicago School’s Chicago Campus in 2009 and for several years made his business teaching other professionals how to use social media to advance their careers. Three years have passed since he published his book, “Graduate to LinkedIn: Jumpstart Your Career Support Network Now,” and he says the social media of today is already vastly different.

“Professionally, you say that you want to brand yourself. But you can sometimes get so lost in branding yourself the way you want to be perceived, that what you present online isn’t who you really are. When potential employers meet you in person, they want you to be consistent,” cautions Fowler, who now works at Deloitte Consulting and sometimes uses his social media background to help clients leverage their brands.

However, in a virtual world where it is understood that everyone exaggerates and reality is always slightly distorted, the temptation to lie or stretch the truth is more pervasive than ever.

It’s one thing to post your prettiest vacation photos on Facebook or to exaggerate how wonderful your life is (for the clear benefit of ex-boyfriends or college rivals), but when it comes to using social media for your professional advancement on sites like LinkedIn, truth and ethics are just as important online as they are on your printed resume.

“One huge thing that’s gone on over time is the social media world isn’t always real. It isn’t reality. I think we need to keep that in mind,” Fowler says. “There’s a fine line between branding yourself well and straight up lying and misrepresenting your experience.”

Resumes have always been prone to exaggeration, despite the best advice to be ready to back up any degree or certification you might claim to have earned. However, in a virtual world where it is understood that everyone exaggerates and reality is always slightly distorted, the temptation to lie or stretch the truth is more pervasive than ever. It then turns into a battle between  truth and falsehoods originating from virtual reality and perceived expectations.

“And for the younger generations—people who were born into this age—there’s a danger there that they could possibly take this as the way the world is,” Fowler  continues. “I think some people want to hide. You go on Twitter and you have an avatar, and you want to hide behind that. But when that doesn’t match up to who you really are, especially professionally, that’s when it comes back to haunt you.”

That said, Fowler still believes in the professional power of social networking sites like LinkedIn, and more recently, Facebook pages being utilized by businesses and organizations. “Social media has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s a tool, and like any tool, you can use it the wrong way. There are great things that come out of it. Just recently, it was instrumental in raising money for people who were affected by Hurricane Sandy. And I think it’s going to evolve. The social aspect of these platforms is going to live on. What remains to be seen is how this will affect the way we conduct business.”

Love in the Time of Social Media

In all of the incarnations and manifestations of social media in our lives, one aspect that can’t be ignored—particularly when it comes to how we present ourselves and perceive others—is how the always-on, must-be-perfect virtual world has changed our most intimate relationships.

Whether you’re a single 20-something looking for a Mr. or Mrs. Right or a newly divorced parent dipping your toes back into the dating scene, online sites such as Match.com , OKCupid.com , and eHarmony.com have revolutionized the idea of how we meet and connect with new people. The fairy tale endings are legendary, as are the tales of love, loss, and heartbreak.

But what is often overlooked is how the surreal world of social media affects people who are already in domestic partnerships, marriages, and other long-term relationships.

Melody Bacon, Ph.D., a licensed clinical therapist, assistant dean of academic affairs and chair of the Marital and Family Therapy program at The Chicago School’s L.A. Campus, says social media and the distractions of technology cause problems for couples because they provide another way to disconnect.

As far as affairs go, Bacon says if the will is there, people will always find a way.

Most people these days have heard stories about how Facebook and other social media sites that offer opportunities to chat or flirt online have wrecked marriages. But Dr. Bacon says we shouldn’t blame Facebook any more than we should blame our 24/7 dependence on cell phones or other digital technology.

“In terms of relationships, it’s just one more thing that keeps people from being able to connect and be together without fighting for attention. I know of young mothers with little kids. I see them at the park, the kids are playing or trying to get attention and mom’s on Facebook or doing something on her phone. They think they’re engaged with the outside world but they’re not. Children are drowning with their mom and dad sitting there on their smartphones. They have no idea how disconnected they are.”

As far as affairs go, Dr. Bacon says if the will is there, people will always find a way.

“If someone’s going to have an affair or cheat in some way, it’s just another opportunity,” she says. “I don’t think it’s causing a problem, but I think it does make it easier. I don’t think it necessarily starts relationships, but people become open, they start flirting, and over time it can become where they connect in person. If you have a partner who is unhappy in their marriage, they are more likely to be available to someone else online.”

The question is, how “real” is that virtual paramour? And if the relationship is based on a carefully groomed online persona, how “real” are you?

A Balance Between Social Media and Reality

That disconnect that Dr. Bacon refers to is at the very heart of what Dr. Turkle is chronicling in Together Alone.

“As we instant message, email, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude,” she writes. “We talk of getting ‘rid’ of our emails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage.

Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they ‘reveal too much.’ They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice.”

The irony of it all is that we can see it happening—to our kids, our friends, even ourselves. We know it’s a problem, but we don’t know how to stop it.

As  Dr. Jazayeri says, social media is here to stay and is a new reality we have to contend with. The question is, how do we find balance?

“Sites like Facebook can be positive in connecting people. In my classes, we do family diagrams, and students are connecting with people across the country or across the world. Facebook is great for meeting up with people that way. It can be positive, but to a limited degree. Because once you’ve made that connection, unless you talk on the phone or have some verbal communication, you’re limited to verbal sound bites,” Dr. Bacon says.

 Tom Barrett, Ph.D., department chair and an associate professor in the clinical psychology department at The Chicago School’s  Chicago Campus, shares many of the same concerns as his colleagues about people losing themselves in this new virtual world. But he also believes that the motivation for connecting online is the same as it’s always been—a human urge to belong, and to be accepted.

“It’s not that the ability to network this way is a problem. People have always experienced the range of emotions from the insecure to the confident,” Dr. Barrett says. “I think we tend to think the technology is what is causing the problem but we just have a new way of expressing an old problem. It’s a long-standing reality that people struggle in relationships. This is a new way to disconnect from your family, or partner, or loved one, but it’s just a new form of doing an old thing.”

As Dr. Jazayeri says, social media is here to stay and is a reality we have to contend with. The question is, how do we find balance?

“I definitely do not want to discard the benefits of all this connectivity, but there has to be a limit to it,” he continues. “I hope people can begin to recognize that Facebook and social media can’t be a substitute for everything in their life. Instead of me sitting and reading other people’s posts on Facebook for two hours, I can go do some community work. Maybe I need to ask myself, ‘why do I always have to be so busy with someone who is not real?’”

As Dr. Gergen said more than two decades ago, “I am linked, therefore I am.”

Do we want this to be our future, our reality? What happens from here is up to us.

If you’re interested in learning more about how social media and the virtual world have impacted people’s idea of reality and individualism, study Psychology & Behavioral Sciences at The Chicago School . 

* This article, originally appearing in the Spring 2013 issue of INSIGHT magazine, was updated in July 2023.

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Interpretation and Perception of The World According to Deaf People

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Friday essay: love and loss in outer space – Ceridwen Dovey on how scientists feel about space objects

Research fellow, Macquarie University

Disclosure statement

Ceridwen Dovey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Macquarie University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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This is the day we will sink our own home – it is old, they say, and can’t live forever. I’m among the ones who must lock the dome behind us and throw the keys in the river of stardust in which we’ve swum for so long. Happy new year! The cry goes up far below us in waves, while we plot to do great wrong to this ship in space. No keening in sorrow: These are my orders. Death first by fireworks, our vessel burned alive like a sailing boat lit aflame at sea by men gone berserk with grief. The saltwater will keep it afloat as long as it can. For the rest of time it will lie in pieces, like a heart once mine.

– A sonnet imagining the final astronauts onboard farewelling the International Space Station (ISS) before its deorbit.

For many years now, through writing fictional stories and making experimental films , I have been trying to see things from the point of view of space objects – real ones that have been launched by humans into outer space.

I’ve imagined the inner and outer lives of space objects like Starman (the mannequin launched by SpaceX in a midnight-cherry Tesla); the first sculpture left on the Moon; the International Space Station; and the Voyager spacecraft now in interstellar space. At heart, my goal has been to understand why humans pour so much meaning into space objects.

I’ve become fascinated by the emotional attachments many people – and especially scientists – form with these objects, from small spacecraft to satellites to space stations. Deep emotions (like grief and love) are often expressed for these objects by space scientists, astronomers, engineers and astronauts who would not, in their ordinary line of work, be expected to think at all about their feelings for inanimate machines or space infrastructure.

“Every object humans have launched into the solar system is a statement,” notes the space archaeologist Alice Gorman , and each “tells the story of our attitudes to space at a particular point in time”.

In political theorist Jane Bennett’s definition , an object is enchanting if it leaves humans “transfixed, spellbound” and “struck and shaken”. This is almost always the case for space objects. They seem to give scientists permission to share emotions that would otherwise be kept hidden.

Coddled and mourned

In 2016, the team in charge of the Rosetta spacecraft grieved openly after Rosetta was crashed on purpose into the comet it had been observing. The mood in the control room was described as “ funereal ”.

During a Zoom talk in 2021, Morgan Cable (an Ocean World Astrochemist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ) was asked by a member of the public what the most memorable project in her career has been.

She responded with raw emotion, paying tribute to the strong bond scientists can form with their space objects, and describing how she felt about the Cassini-Huygens robotic spacecraft launched in 1997 to study Saturn and its moons:

Right near the end of Cassini’s life [in 2015], it was running out of gas, and we didn’t want it to just drift around the Saturn system […] We had cleaned it but hadn’t sterilized it – so we had to put Cassini in a safe place where it couldn’t contaminate other worlds. We did this beautiful swan dive into Saturn, a place with no liquid water, so that we could preserve future worlds – like Encephalus and Titan – for future explorers, without being contaminated. When we said farewell to Cassini in that beautiful swan dive … [the] spacecraft …[was] part of our family. We grew to love and became a part of it. It was incredibly difficult to say goodbye to that spacecraft.

American astronaut Don Pettit lovingly wrote from the perspective of a real, living zucchini plant grown on the ISS (along with broccoli and sunflower seedlings) to create his wildly popular Diary of a Space Zucchini blog after he’d returned from the station. This little seedling, an object of research, struggles into existence and tries to make sense of the human world around it. In the following excerpt from his blog, “Gardener” is the zucchini’s name for the astronaut who tends to it:

Excitement is in the air. Gardener said we will soon be returning to Earth. Our part of the mission is nearly complete and the new crew will take over for us. I am a bit worried about Broccoli, Sunflower, and me. If Gardener leaves, who will take care of us? And what about little Zuc? He is now a big sprout and ready to branch out on his own. Gardener talked about pressing us. I am not sure what that means; this does not sound good.

In certain contexts, this “love” scientists feel for space objects can be openly expressed – even for a zucchini being grown in microgravity, for instance, through a whimsical and sweet narrative voice.

This is quite different to the emotional rules usually governing any scientific engagement with objects of study. Anthropologist Anna L. Tsing has observed that natural scientists can be deeply interested “in the lives of the nonhuman subjects being studied,” but “mainly on the condition that the love didn’t show”.

More recently, certain climate scientists have begun to express their own ecological (or climate) grief openly , in spite of the professional pressure to hide their emotions when it comes to their ultimate research subject (or object): our planet Earth.

Yet this taboo against scientists feeling a genuine emotional connection to the objects of their research does not always seem to apply to scientists making, launching or studying space objects.

The scientists and technical team in ground control for the Spirit Mars rover mission spoke often of Spirit as if “she” were alive during her seven years of active work on Mars, anthropomorphising Spirit into an object of adoration. Said one team member , “She’s a stubborn old girl and she’s hanging in there, and she is not going to give up”.

The Opportunity Mars rover (Spirit’s twin), simultaneously exploring another part of Mars during the same mission, was gendered as male by the control team. Opportunity got trapped in a dust storm at one stage, and “his” battery power began to drain.

Steve Squyres, the lead scientist, describes having “this horrible, helpless feeling because there was nothing we could do … [i]t was like Mars was trying to kill our machine”. Squyres later reflected on all that the two rovers had been asked by humans to do, using a parenting analogy of needing to let a child grow up and become resilient and independent:

When we first built [them], we babied them, we coddled them, we dressed up in funny suits, we had rubber gloves on, we tiptoed around them and were extremely careful […] [n]ow they are scratched, beat up, and dirty.

When Spirit was on her last legs, and the team had to come to terms with the fact that her mission was over, Squyres admitted, “It hit me harder than I thought it would […] emotionally”.

Envoys of humankind

All of these objects are our proxies in outer space. Once they are out there, representing us in places we have been unable to go, they become the “envoys” of humankind (as human astronauts are defined in Article V of the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty).

This is an impossible task, of course. How can the twin Voyager spacecraft, for instance – the most distant human-made objects, currently in interstellar space – carry the full representational burden of who we are? They are doomed to fail. But maybe we think of them as loveable because of this very vulnerability.

Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and anthropologist of science and technology, was never afraid to inhabit radically different perspectives, including those of objects and infrastructure. He wrote a novel-of-sorts – half whodunnit, half sociological tome – partly from the perspective of ARAMIS, the high-tech subway system planned for Paris in the 1980s that never came into being.

In certain sections of this novel (called Aramis, or the Love of Technology ) the system itself speaks, making its case to the humans who essentially betrayed or failed it (engineers, officials, a sociologist) and reminding them it has desires too, but depends on the human and technical networks around it to survive.

Latour is alive to the reciprocal flow of relationships between humans, objects and institutions, and advocates dissolving boundaries between things considered to be artificial and those considered to be natural.

As Australian sociologist of science Annie Handmer notes in her interpretation of this novel , Latour “slowly makes his reader fall in love with this ingenious, complicated, and enchanting train”. He asks us to acknowledge the network of relationships in which we’re entwined with things, networks that have both emotional and social resonance.

The “imagined conversations between components of its engine,” Handmer writes, “evoke an emotional affection in us for the technology that makes it all the more heartbreaking when Latour tells us that ARAMIS died because no-one loved it enough”.

Latour’s approach was particularly useful to me while I was writing from the perspective of the International Space Station in my collection of short stories Only the Astronauts . Like ARAMIS, the ISS is a major infrastructure project, among the most expensive ever undertaken by humans. The ISS, of course, did not fail before it could live, but it has always been dependent for survival on a nexus of human-technical elements made even more complex by its location in space, and the multinational nature of its governance.

The ISS has inspired big emotions like love and awe in humans. One could say it will “die” within the next decade because we aren’t “loving” it enough. The ISS’s international mission and cooperative management will not be sustained for much longer, leading to its inevitable deorbit in the next five to ten years (unless some kind of public-private partnership is created to “rescue” it).

In some mainstream media coverage, this decision to deorbit the ISS has been described as an “ abandonment ” of the space station.

From love to fear

Yet through the course of my research, I began to notice that space objects once deemed enchanting and “loveable” could suddenly start to seem threatening to humans. The ways in which they can survive and thrive outside of our will and designs for them can sometimes shade into a kind of horror of the undead.

Abandoned places and objects that refuse to decay, that persist in spite of no longer having a living human presence to give their existence meaning, become spooky. Our feelings for these objects can shade dark, into uncanny and eerie territory. We love these objects for going where we cannot, but we can also start to fear them for this, and for living so long. They scare us by not dying.

This passage from a recent non-fiction book about space exploration ( Ad Astra: An Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet ) struck me for this reason. Note how quickly the abandoned Russian space station, Salyut 7 – once it persists beyond human use value – becomes the site of a Gothic nightmare:

On 2 October 1984, the Soyuz T-10 crew […] prepared to leave Salyut 7. As they were shutting up shop, preparing the station to be temporarily mothballed in automatic mode, they left the customary crackers and salt on the table as a gift for the next crew […] But after they left and returned to earth, a transmitter malfunction led to a short-circuiting of the electronics and all the electrical systems shut down […] The station was dead […] With its solar panels no longer facing towards the sun, it began to freeze […] Spit would freeze to the walls and icicles hung from the pipes […] The crackers were waiting for them on the fold-down table.

Humans can become haunted by space objects once we no longer know if they are still there or not, or in what form they persist. It has only recently been acknowledged that re-entry particles from objects, satellites and spacecraft burning up in Earth’s atmosphere don’t simply disappear, but form a kind of ghostly toxic dust that may, over time, contribute to global warming. These objects can quite literally come back to haunt us, even if they seem to have dropped out of orbit and disappeared.

There is some ambivalence, then, in how we think and feel about space objects. They are our dignified emissaries to other worlds and will be justly rewarded with immortality (and expressions of love, even from hardened space scientists).

Once they are no longer responsive to our commands, however, they might be recast as dangerous trash that can kill us: just one bit of space junk the wrong size hitting the ISS could make it immediately uninhabitable, for instance.

Space objects are sacrificial offerings we make to the universe, sent on journeys into the unknown. They are banal things that suddenly become vibrant objects – spiritual relics – because they have touched the celestial void.

They may depend on us for their survival if they’re in orbit, and we may still have the power to bring some of them back down; but the ones that escape further out will eventually have their freedom and agency, whether we want them to or not.

Every launch of a space object is a birth and a death. For the object, it is the start of a grand adventure, one that – if the object is lucky – may take place outside human surveillance, under cover of the mystery of space.

Space objects resist our interpretations of what they mean, even as we want them to mean so much, even as we feel so much for them. This is an important reminder that it is a political act to take a non-human perspective, and to consider the agency, subjectivity, sociality and power of things – not just living things, but non-living things – in co-making the world.

This awareness that humans are not in total control, and that – as social scientists are pointing out – we have responsibilities to those “non-human beings [that] share our paths” can bring up mixed feelings for us as a species. These are exactly the kinds of feelings that fiction writers and filmmakers can mine.

My invented stories are, in one sense, just another layer of narrative that is being forced upon certain space objects. I can claim that I am on their side, that I write these imagined stories in tribute to their wild spirit, their anarchic and fertile disobedience to human control, or out of the same wells of love and grief that space scientists express for their rovers, or that astronauts express for their space plant seedlings.

Yet in truth, it is in their total and frustrating silence that space objects remain a site of resistance to human meaning-making. Maybe this is why we adore them so much, fear them when they stop responding, and grieve their destruction so openly: because our love for them is unrequited.

• Space travel
• Friday essay
• International Space Station

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• Open access
• Published: 27 July 2024

Artificial intelligence in medical education - perception among medical students

• Preetha Jackson 1 ,
• Gayathri Ponath Sukumaran 1 ,
• Chikku Babu 1 ,
• M. Christa Tony 1 ,
• Deen Stephano Jack 1 ,
• V. R. Reshma 1 ,
• Dency Davis 1 ,
• Nisha Kurian 1 &
• Anjum John 1  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  804 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes pervasive in healthcare, including applications like robotic surgery and image analysis, the World Medical Association emphasises integrating AI education into medical curricula. This study evaluates medical students’ perceptions of ‘AI in medicine’, their preferences for AI training in education, and their grasp of AI’s ethical implications in healthcare.

Materials & methods

A cross-sectional study was conducted among 325 medical students in Kerala using a pre-validated, semi structured questionnaire. The survey collected demographic data, any past educational experience about AI, participants’ self-evaluation of their knowledge and evaluated self-perceived understanding of applications of AI in medicine. Participants responded to twelve Likert-scale questions targeting perceptions and ethical aspects and their opinions on suggested topics on AI to be included in their curriculum.

Results & discussion

AI was viewed as an assistive technology for reducing medical errors by 57.2% students and 54.2% believed AI could enhance medical decision accuracy. About 49% agreed that AI could potentially improve accessibility to healthcare. Concerns about AI replacing physicians were reported by 37.6% and 69.2% feared a reduction in the humanistic aspect of medicine. Students were worried about challenges to trust (52.9%), patient-physician relationships (54.5%) and breach of professional confidentiality (53.5%). Only 3.7% felttotally competent in informing patients about features and risks associated with AI applications. Strong demand for structured AI training was expressed, particularly on reducing medical errors (76.9%) and ethical issues (79.4%).

This study highlights medical students’ demand for structured AI training in undergraduate curricula, emphasising its importance in addressing evolving healthcare needs and ethical considerations. Despite widespread ethical concerns, the majority perceive AI as an assistive technology in healthcare. These findings provide valuable insights for curriculum development and defining learning outcomes in AI education for medical students.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dates back to the 1950s when Alan Turing, often referred to as the father of computer science, proposed the question, “Can machines think”? Interestingly, he designed the now famous ‘Turing Test’ where humans were to identify the responder of a question as human or machine [ 1 ]. Subsequently in 1956 John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” [ 2 ] and the next decade saw the birth of the first ever artificial neural network which was “the first machine which is capable of having an original idea” [ 3 ]. Thus progressed the growth of this once unimaginable phenomenon. In this 21st century, most people are familiar with the term AI because of Siri (Intelligent Virtual Assistant) [ 4 ], Open AI’s ChatGPT (language model based chatbot) [ 5 ], traffic prediction by Google Maps or Uber [ 6 ] or customer service bots (AI powered assistants) [ 4 ] that intelligently provide suggestions.

There is no universally accepted definition for AI, but it can be simply defined as “the ability of machines to mimic intelligent human behaviour, including problem solving and learning” [ 7 ]. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, machine vision, and many more, applying which AI has exhibited qualities similar to or even above those of humans [ 8 ].

The use of AI and related technologies is becoming increasingly prevalent in all aspects of human life and beginning to influence the field of healthcare too [ 9 ]. AI technologies have already developed algorithms to analyse a variety of health data, including clinical, behavioural, environmental, and drug information using data from both patients as well as biomedical literature [ 10 ]. Convoluted Neural Networks, designed to automatically and adaptively learn spatial hierarchies of features, can be successfully used to develop diabetic retinopathy screening [ 11 ], skin lesion classification [ 12 ], lymph node metastasis detection [ 13 ], and detection of an abnormality in a radiograph [ 14 ].

Artificial Intelligence can help patients understand their symptoms, influence health seeking behaviour, and thereby improve their quality of life [ 15 ]. AI assistants have even suggested medicines for cancer patients with equal or better efficiency than human experts [ 16 ]. With a capable AI assistant, it is possible to sift through and analyse multitudes of data in a matter of seconds and make conclusions, thus exponentially increasing its applications in biomedical research. AI promises future influences in healthcare in terms of AI assisted robotic surgery, virtual nursing assistants, and image analysis. Simply put, AI can help patients and healthcare providers in diagnosing a disease, assessing risk of disease, estimating treatment success, managing complications, and supporting patients [ 17 ].

Though AI has limitless potential, it has certain vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The quality and relevance of the input data can affect the accuracy of a deep learning diagnostic AI.The kind of funding that is required to construct the machinery and develop an intelligence is not easily accessible in the field of medicine, not to mention the constraints of machine ethics and confidentiality. However, being familiar with the concepts, applications and advantages of AI is definitely beneficial and therefore advisable, especially in the field of medical education and policy making [ 17 , 18 ].

The World Medical Association advocates for a change in medical curricula and educational opportunities for patients, physicians, medical students, health administrators, and other health care professionals to foster a better understanding of the numerous aspects of the healthcare AI, both positive and negative [ 19 ]. Additionally, in 2019, the Standing Committee of European Doctors stressed the need to use AI systems in basic and continuing medical education [ 20 ]. They recommended the need for AI systems to be integrated into medical education, residency training, and continuing medical education courses to increase awareness of the proper use of AI. In this context, there is an emerging need for developing curricula specifically designed to train future physicians on AI.

To develop an effective AI curriculum, we need to understand how today’s medical students perceive AI in medicine, and their comprehension of AI’s ethical dimension as well. However, the available need assessment studies in an Indian setting are barely enough. Grunhut et al. had recommended in 2021 that national surveys need to be carried out among medical students on the attitude and expectations of learning AI in medical colleges for developing a curriculum [ 21 ]. Similar unbiased probability based, large scale surveys would identify the realistic goals physicians will be asked to meet, the expectations that will be put on them, and the resources and knowledge they would need to meet these goals. Also, current literature falls short of a comprehensive needs assessment which is important for curriculum development and defining learning outcomes. Hence in this study we aimed to assess the perceptions on ‘AI in medicine’ among Indian medical students, to assess the proportion of medical students who are in favour of structured training on AI applications during their undergraduate course, and also to assess their perceptions on AI’s ethical dimensions.

Recruitment: A cross-sectional study was conducted among the undergraduate medical students of Pushpagiri Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre during the period of June – August 2023. An introductory discussion on the purpose and importance of this study was conducted with each batch of students from first year to house surgeons following which the link to the Google-form containing the consent and questionnaire was shared in the batch Whatsapp groups.

There were a total of 500 medical students in the Institute from 1st year MBBS to the medical students undergoing their internship. The Google form was open for 3 months, with reminder messages sent at intervals of one month. Participation was voluntary (informed consent was obtained through the first section of the Google form)due to which no randomisation could be ensured, implying that some selection bias can be expected.

Participants who did not consent or submitted incomplete questionnaires were excluded from the study. An online survey using Google forms was conducted using a validated semi structured questionnaire which had 3 sections. The questions were adopted from a Turkish study by Civaner et al. [ 22 ]. Since the questionnaire was originally drafted in English, there was no need for translation into a comprehensible language. The first section dealt with demographic details (age, gender and year of study), any past educational experience about AI (had attended training or seminars) and participants’ self-evaluation of their knowledge of AI. The second section consisted of 12 five point Likert questions on medical students’ perceptions of AI including five questions on ethical aspects as well, which were expressed in the form of agreement or disagreement. The last section was about their opinions on selected topics on AI - whether they should be included in their medical curriculum or not. A pilot study was undertaken by administering the questionnaire to a group of 20 medical students who were then posted in the Department of Community Medicine.

Statistical Analysis: Responses on medical students’ perception on the possible influences of AI were graded using Likert scale ranging from 0 (totally disagree) to 4 (totally agree). Data was entered into Microsoft Excel and analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences 25.0. Age of the participants is expressed as mean with standard deviation and categorical variables such as opinions, perceptions and year of study are expressed as frequencies and percentages.

Out of 500 medical students in the institution, 327 students participated in the survey. After excluding the incomplete questionnaires, data of 325 participants were analysed. Therefore the response rate amounts to 65%.

The mean (SD) age of the participants was 21.4 (1.9) years, (ranging from 18 to 25 years) with 76% (248/325) females.

AI in medicine- prior knowledge and self-evaluation

Majority of students (91.4%)(297/325) stated that they had not received any training on AI in their medical curriculum, while the others mentioned that they had attended events like seminars and presentations on AI. Almost 52%(169/325) students have heard about AI but possess no knowledge of it. One third of the participants (106/325) self-reported to have ‘partial knowledge’ on AI while none of them reported to be ‘very knowledgeable.’

Of all the participants, only 37.2% (121/325) did not agree with the opinion that AI could replace physicians; instead, the majority thought that it could be an assistant or a tool that would help them. About 37.6% (122/325) of participants agreed that the use of AI would reduce the need for physicians and thus result in loss of jobs. More than half of the participants (173/325) agreed that they would become better physicians with the widespread use of AI applications. Almost 35% (114/325) stated that their choice of specialization would be influenced by how AI was used in that field. Only 26.8% (87/325) of participants totally or mostly agreed that they felt competent enough to give information on AI to patients. More than half of the participants (166/325) were unsure of protecting patient confidentiality while using AI.

Perceptions on the possible influences of AI in medicine

Regarding student perceptions on the possible influences of AI in medicine (Fig.  1 ), the highest agreement (72.3%) was observed on the item ‘reduces error in medical practice’ (235/325) while the lowest agreement (40.3%) was on ‘devalues the medical profession’ (131/325). Students were mostly in favour of applying AI in medicine because they felt it would enable them to make more accurate decisions (72%, (234/325) and would facilitate patients’ access to healthcare (60.9%, 198/325). There were 59.4% (193/325) of participants who agreed that AI would facilitate patient education and 50.5% (164/325) who agreed that AI would allow the patient to increase their control over their own health.

Frequency distribution of perceptions of medical students on AI in medicine

Need for training on AI in medical curriculum

Almost three-fourths of the participants were in favour of structured training on AI applications that should be given during medical education (74.8%, 243/325). The participants thought that it was important to be trained on various topics related to AI in medicine as depicted in Fig.  2 . The most frequent topics that they perceived necessary in this domain were knowledge and skills about AI applications (84.3%274/325), training to prevent and solve ethical problems that may arise with AI applications (79.4%258/325), and AI assisted risk analysis for diseases (78.1%254/325).

Frequency distribution of opinions of medical students as to whether the suggested topics should be included in their medical curriculum

Ethical concerns regarding AI in medicine (Table  1 )

On the topic of disadvantages and risks of using AI in medicine 69.2% (225/325) agreed that AI would reduce the humanistic aspect of the medical profession, 54.5% (177/325) agreed that it could negatively affect the patient-physician relationship, 52.9% (173/325) were concerned that using AI assisted applications can damage trust in patients while 53.5% (174/325) thought that AI could possibly cause violations of professional confidentiality.

Sub group analysis

Perceptions about being a better doctor with the use of AI applications, being competent enough to inform patients about features & risks of AI applications and the perception about the use of AI in medicine causing a reduction in job opportunities were the ones which showed significant association with the baseline variables like gender, year of study and having prior exposure to course of AI applications as shown in Table  2 .

Although there has been extensive research on the utilisation of AI in medical education the perceptions of medical professionals, and their dilemmas regarding its integration into their daily practice remains relatively underexplored. This research is focused on the perception of medical students about the use of Artificial Intelligence in medicine and its ethical aspects, which reflects their confusions and concerns regarding the situation.

The mean age of the medical students studied was around 21 years and the majority of students were females. Most participants in our study (53.3%) agreed that AI could not replace the presence of a physician but could help them in their work. This is in accordance with the 2021 study conducted by Bisdas S et al. on medical students from 63 countries that AI could work as a “partner” rather than as a “competitor” in their medical practice. A third of our participants (37.6%) felt that the use of AI would reduce the need for physicians and would result in a loss of job opportunities for them. This is a different finding than the study published by D Pinto Dos Santos in European Radiology in 2019 where a majority of participants (83%) felt that human radiologists would not be replaced by robots or computers [ 23 ]. In fact, there are many studies which argue that rather than physicians becoming redundant because of AI, they would change their practice and become “managers” rather than “custodians of information” [ 24 , 25 ].

More than half the respondents in our study (53.3%) agreed that they would become better physicians with the widespread use of AI applications. This is in concurrence with a recently published Western Australian study among medical students which showed about 75% of the participants agreeing that AI would improve their practice [ 26 ]. Respondents from other studies felt that currently available AI systems would actually complement physicians’ decision-making skills by synthesising large amounts of medical literature in order to produce the most up-to-date medical protocols and evidence [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. Similarly, studies show that AI systems actually work by complementing the practice of medicine, rather than competing with human minds. After all, human minds have designed artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the study by Paranjape et al. comments that physicians will be able to focus on providing patients with the humanistic care considering the biopsychosocial model of disease as the technicalities can be handled by the AI supported technologies to a greater extent [ 28 ].

A third of the participants (35.1%) in our research stated that their choice of specialisation would be influenced by how AI was used in that field. Much has been written about how AI might replace specialists in the fields of radiology and pathology as perceived by medical doctors and students. These are specialisations that use computers and digital algorithms more when compared to other medical specialties. A Canadian study published in 2019 by Bo Gong et al. found that 67% of the respondents felt that AI would “reduce the demand” for radiologists. Many of the medical students interviewed in this study said that the anxiety they felt about being “displaced” by AI technologies in radiology would discourage them from considering the field for specialisation [ 14 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. In fact, a paper published by Yurdasik et al. in 2021 had respondents encouraging practitioners to move away from specialisations that used AI [ 34 ]. However, there were other studies that reported results encouraging radiologists to get exposed to AI technologies so as to lower the rates of “imaging related medical errors” and “lessening time spent in reading films,” resulting in more time spent with patients. German medical students have shown a positive attitude towards AI and have reported “not being afraid of being replaced by AI” should they choose radiology as their specialisation [ 23 ]. Attitude towards the choice of specialisation being influenced by AI depended on where the person was viewing the problem from- as a student or as a specialist and also from the degree of familiarity they had with AI applications.

The majority of the students (91.4%) stated that they had not received any training on AI in medicine. The American Medical Association meeting of 2018 on Augmented Intelligence advocated for the training of physicians so that they could understand algorithms and work effectively with AI systems to make the best clinical care decisions for their patients [ 35 ]. Despite this, Paranjape et al. reported that training on the backend of electronic health record systems like, the quality of the data obtained, impact of computer use in front of patients, patient physician relationships etc. have not been addressed through medical education. If used with adequate training and understanding, AI will free up physicians’ time/ optimise a physician’s work hours, so that they can care and communicate with patients in the free time thus obtained. The findings of the research published by Jha et al. in the year 2022 agrees with this observation regarding inadequate coverage of AI and machine learning in medical curricula [ 36 ]. This deficiency leaves medical students underprepared to navigate the integration of AI technologies into their future practice. A significant percentage (37.6%) of respondents expressed concerns about job displacements due to AI, echoing sentiments observed in previous research. The concerns on AI induced loss of jobs particularly in fields like radiology and pathology, accentuate the importance of addressing misconceptions and fostering a meticulous understanding of AI’s role in healthcare. Jha et al’s study also highlights the importance of integrating soft skills, such as compassion and empathy, alongside AI education. Medical students must be equipped not only with technical AI competencies but also with the interpersonal skills necessary for holistic patient care. Collaborative efforts are needed to develop curricula that balance AI education with the cultivation of humanistic values, ensuring that future healthcare professionals can effectively navigate the intersection of technology and patient-centred care.

A major proportion of students in the study conducted by Sharma et al. demonstrated only a limited understanding of AI’s applications in medicine, primarily attributed to a lack of formal education, awareness, and interest. Interestingly, while a substantial portion (26.3%) of respondents demonstrated familiarity with AI, the majority (53.6%) exhibited only a superficial understanding of its applications in medicine [ 37 ]. This gap in knowledge highlights the need for enhanced educational initiatives to provide comprehensive insights into the potential of AI in healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. Concerns about the overreliance (49.2%) on AI and perceived lack of empathy (43.7%) were highlighted by a considerable proportion of students. These concerns underscore the importance of fostering a balanced approach to AI adoption in medical practice and education, ensuring that students are equipped to navigate the ethical challenges associated with AI integration.

Medical curriculum does not address mathematical concepts (to understand algorithms), the fundamentals of AI like data science, or the ethical and legal issues that can come up with the use of AI [ 27 ]. Only 26.8% of participants felt partially or completely competent to give information on AI to patients. Unless physicians have a foundational understanding of AI, or the methods to critically appraise AI, they will be at a loss when called to train medical students on the use of AI tools that assist in medical decision making. Consequently, medical students will be deficient in AI skills. Liaw et al. advocate for Quintuple Competencies for the use of AI in primary health care, one of which is the need to understand how to communicate with patients regarding the why and how of the use of AI tools, privacy and confidentiality questions that patients may raise during patient physician interactions, and understand the emotional, trust or patient satisfaction issues that may arise because of use of AI in health care [ 38 ].

More than half of the participants (51.1%) are unsure of being able to protect professional confidentiality of patients during the use of AI technologies. Direct providers of health care need to be aware of what precautions to take when sharing data with third parties who are not the direct care providers to the patients [ 16 ]. Artificial intelligence algorithms are derived from large data sets from human participants, and they may use data differently at different points in time. In such cases, patients can lose control of information they had consented to share especially where the impact on their privacy have not been adequately addressed [ 39 ]. However much regulations might be made to protect patient confidentiality and privacy of data, they might always fall behind AI advances, which means the human brain has to work consistently to remain ahead of the artificial intelligence it created. Guidelines set forth by reputable organisations such as the European Union’s “Guidelines for Trustworthy AI“ [ 40 ] and the World Health Organization’s “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health” address critical ethical concerns in AI [ 41 ]. These core principles can be integrated into medical education to cultivate ethical awareness among medical students.

The perceptions of medical students on the possible influences of AI in medicine were evaluated through the questionnaire. The highest agreement was found on the question, whether they thought the use of AI ‘reduces error in medical practice’ (72.3%) while the lowest agreement was on the question AI ‘devalues the medical profession’ (40.3%).Students were mostly in favour of the use of AI in medicine because they felt that it would enable them as physicians to make more accurate decisions (72%) and facilitate patients’ access to healthcare (60.9%). Research by Topol et al. and Sharique et al. have shown that AI technologies can help reduce medical errors by improving data flow patterns and improving diagnostic accuracy [ 39 , 42 ]. The study from Western Australian students mentioned above [ 26 ] showed 74.4% of the participants agreeing that the use of AI would improve practice of medicine in general. It is encouraging to find that medical students in this research showed low agreement when asked if AI would devalue the medical profession and agreed that the use of AI would reduce medical errors caused inadvertently. It should also be noted that some research has shown that the inappropriate use of AI itself can introduce errors in medical practice [ 43 ].

On “disadvantages and risks of AI in medicine”, 69.2% of the students agreed that AI would reduce the humanistic aspect of the medical profession, 54.5% agreed that it can negatively affect the patient-physician relationship, 52.9% were concerned that using AI assisted applications could damage the trust patients placed on physicians, 59.4% agreed that AI would facilitate patient education, and 50.5% agreed that AI would allow the patient to increase their control over their own health. Hadithy et al. (2023) found that students believed AI technology was advantageous for improving overall health by personalising health care through analysing patient information [ 44 ].

Medical education in the 21st century is swiftly transitioning from the conventional approach of observing patients objectively from a distance and holding the belief that compassion is an innate skill to a contemporary paradigm. The new model emphasises the development of competencies such as doctor-patient relationships, communication skills, and professionalism. In modern medicine, AI is being viewed as an additional barrier between a patient and his physician. Machines have many advantages over humans as rightly observed by Wartman especially in view of not being affected by many of the human frailties like fatigue, information overload, inability to retain material beyond a limit etc. [ 24 ]. Scepticism over the use of AI in medical practice often stems from the lack of knowledge in this domain. Medical students, in many studies, opined that classes on artificial intelligence need to be included in syllabus, but only very few medical schools have included these in their medical curricula. Practising with compassion and empathy must be a learnt and cultivated skill along with artificial intelligence. The two should go together, taught in tandem throughout the medical course. Studies such as this have highlighted that students are open to being taught but are deficient in the skills and knowledge. There is a gap here that needs to be addressed. Man, and machine have to work as partners so as to improve the health of the people.

Limitations

Though this research was one of the first conducted in the state of Kerala and covered about 65% of medical students of the institution, which is more than other similar surveys conducted, there are a few limitations that have been identified. As an online survey method using Google Forms was implied for data collection, the voluntary nature of the participation from only those who were interested, might have introduced a self-selection bias and a non-response bias in this research. As this study only includes the responses from the medical students of one institution, it might not have captured a wide variety of responses. Hence the generalizability of the study may be limited. The questionnaire did not delve deep into how AI terms are understood, or how proficient students were with AI and so might have missed more relevant AI terms and concepts that students might be unfamiliar with. Most data collected in this study were quantitative so we might not have captured the depth of the students’ understanding or perceptions about AI. As many of the students had no exposure to computer science or had not attended AI classes, their perceptions might have been influenced by lack of exposure. Thus, the study might not have captured the views of those who had a more informed background on the subject.

Future studies are recommended to replicate and validate the findings in larger and more diverse populations to understand regional variations in knowledge, attitude, and perceptions among medical students. This study tool (questionnaire) was adopted from a parent study by Civaner M M [ 10 ], but the last question on the need for any other topic to be included was not met with enthusiasm.

This exploration into the perceptions of medical students regarding the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into medical education reveals a nuanced landscape. The majority of participants in this study recognize the collaborative potential of AI, viewing it not as a replacement for physicians but as a valuable ally in healthcare. Interestingly, concerns on job displacement coexist with the optimism about improved decision-making and enhanced medical practice. The knowledge deficit in this context can extend an incompetence in communicating AI related information to patients, highlighting the urgent need for a holistic approach to medical education. The findings complement the perceived need of a proactive approach in preparing medical students for a future where AI plays a pivotal role in healthcare, ensuring that they not only embrace technological advancements but also uphold the humanistic values inherent to the practice of medicine.

Data availability

Data is provided as supplementary information files.

Abbreviations

Artificial Intelligence

Indian Institute of Technology

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Civaner and team - for providing us with the questionnaire that we used for this research and being available to answer any questions we had.Dr. Rosin George Varghese and Dr. Joe Abraham- for reviewing the protocol of the research and suggesting corrections. Dr. Felix Johns- the Head of the department of Community Medicine for his support during the project.

There has been no funding provided for this research or publication so far.

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P.J. - Design, acquisition, analysis, interpretation of data, drafting of the work and revisions.G.P.S.- Acquisition, analysis, interpretation of data, substantially revising the work.D.D- Acquisition, interpretation of data, substantially revising the work. C.B., C.T.M, & D.S.J.- acquisition, and reading through manuscript during final revision.R.V.R- Analysis, Interpretation of data, reading through manuscript and substantial revisions.N.K- Substantially revising the work.A.J- Conception, design, acquisition, drafting of the work and substantially contributing to revisions. All authors reviewed the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anjum John .

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Ethical approval of the study was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Committee of Pushpagiri Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre (Dated: 29 June 2023 No. PIMSRC /E1/388A/72/2023).

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Jackson, P., Ponath Sukumaran, G., Babu, C. et al. Artificial intelligence in medical education - perception among medical students . BMC Med Educ 24 , 804 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05760-0

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Received : 04 January 2024

Accepted : 09 July 2024

Published : 27 July 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05760-0

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Polarimetric Imaging for Robot Perception: A Review

• Taglione, Camille
• Mateo, Carlos
• Stolz, Christophe

In recent years, the integration of polarimetric imaging into robotic perception systems has increased significantly, driven by the accessibility of affordable polarimetric sensors. This technology complements traditional color imaging by capturing and analyzing the polarization characteristics of light. This additional information provides robots with valuable insights into object shape, material composition, and other properties, ultimately enabling more robust manipulation tasks. This review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the principles behind polarimetric imaging and its diverse applications within the field of robotic perception. By exploiting the polarization state of light, polarimetric imaging offers promising solutions to three key challenges in robot vision: Surface segmentation; depth estimation through polarization patterns; and 3D reconstruction using polarimetric data. This review emphasizes the practical value of polarimetric imaging in robotics by demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing real-world challenges. We then explore potential applications of this technology not only within the core robotics field but also in related areas. Through a comparative analysis, our goal is to elucidate the strengths and limitations of polarimetric imaging techniques. This analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of its broad applicability across various domains within and beyond robotics.

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