Every day I coach boy’s high school lacrosse. We shoot on the goals and the boys miss their shots and the ball goes 40 to 60 yards away somewhere in the grass. At the end of practice we have big ball hunt. They need to go and find all the balls that were missed or lost and put them in my ball bag. Sometimes I help in finding lacrosse balls. There have been multiple times that I would see a white shape in the distance that looked like it was a lacrosse ball. I’m always sure of myself that it is. What else could be out in the field that is white and looks like a ball? But very often I walk all the way to that white ball looking object and it turns out to be trash or maybe even a few daisies grouped together. My eyes and mind believed what I saw appeared to be a lacrosse ball but in actuality it was something completely different. My perception was off.
So why did I think I saw a lacrosse ball? Well, perception is defined as “experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses” (Goldstein 52). Senses being taste, touch, smell, hearing and seeing. My sight was being stimulated to perceive the lacrosse ball. There are a few big ideas that can explain why my eyes played this trick on me. The first is inverse projection problem. This is what happens when we need to figure out what the object that is being projected on our retina is (Goldstein 57). When we look at an object its image is reflected onto our retina, the problem is this image can be created by an infinite number of things. The image then could absolutely be a lacrosse ball or it may not.
The other major reasons I perceived a lacrosse ball is, bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing is when we use the information strait from the environment and send it to our brain to perceive whatever is in front of us. The energy from the environment entered my eye, which allowed me to perceive the ball. This brings in top-down processing, which is when we use the knowledge that we already have to help us perceive objects or images in our retina. I used my previous knowledge of what a lacrosse ball looks like to determine that it was a lacrosse ball that I perceived. Lastly, these two processes working together as well as “regularities in the environment” helped determine it was a lacrosse ball. Regularities in the environment is the idea that characteristics in our environment occur frequently (Goldstein 67). The large patch of grass that we play on is always green and rarely ever has other colors or shapes within it. So because this white bulge in the grass is not usually there, I thought that it was a lacrosse ball.
When I got closer to what I perceived as a ball, all of these processes were simultaneously working together so I could see the white bulge in the grass. Getting closer gave me more information which caused me to see that it was not a lacrosse ball but in in fact a piece of trash that was white. This is almost exactly what happened to Crystal in our textbook. She thought the umbrella was driftwood but as she got closer her brain was able to process that it was not driftwood and in fact an umbrella (Goldstein 52). Perception may seem like a simple task that we perform everyday but in reality it is a complex process involving multiple actions that work together seamlessly. Our brains take in information and use information already stored in our brain to help us perceive everything around us.
References
Goldstein, E.B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience (4th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.