Psychology Case

Ever since reading about perception and how our mind perceives things, I have been curious to know how people would react to certain tests presented without any foreknowledge of what they would be questioned on. The more specific area of perception I am talking about is Gestalt psychology or the ability to perceive something or overall pattern in more than one way. I asked someone if they would participate in a test/study and made sure that they had not studied this area or had any prior exposure to the test I would give them as it would make the results bias.

I presented them with 5 pictures (attached to back) one at a time and asked them to describe to me what they saw. The first three pictures were reversible images and almost immediately they were able to describe an object to me. After they had done so, I told them to look at the picture again and study it more carefully. They would take the picture and tilt it this way and that, flip it upside down, look at it from close and afar and would finally figure it out. On average it took them about another three minutes to see that indeed there was another way to perceive the picture and discover the second object. The next two pictures I showed them required distinguishing an object from the background. These took much longer for them to figure out and it was about five minutes per picture before they could describe to me what was there.

There are a few reasons as to why it takes our brain so long to figure out these things. In our brain we have neurons in our visual cortex called feature detectors. These neurons react to simple figures such as a line. We see the line and can instantly distinguish that yes, that is a line. In the pictures we are almost all capable of picking up on the basic image right away. This process is known as the bottom-up process which states tiny elements combine to produce a larger item which we pick up on easily. Gestalt psychology however says that feature detectors are not all that is required. They state that although feature detectors are important, perception requires a top-down process to. This is where we apply our experiences and expectations to perceive what we see. Or in other words, to see the hidden image, we take what we already know and use it to find what is hidden deeper in the picture.