The Perception - Artificial Human Sensors: Science and Applications - page 57

in this section, perception is a complex process, involving both sensing organs and
the brain that is subjective and indeed a procedure not fully understood. This fact
may affect an individual's personal behaviour and at the first glance verify that
an aged person with a huge amount of earlier experience at disposal would make
more efficient decisions than of a younger person without this storage of knowl-
edge. The fact however, indicates that memory is divided into a short and a long
term memory, that may have a fuzzy priority of what is important knowledge and
for how long to keep it in memory is important, Best (1995) and Eysenck (1993) as
illustrated in Fig. 3.2. The performance of the sensing organ also decreases over
time and the limiting age-related observation and action abilities may in some
situations be compensated with a larger amount of experience at least until the
dementia effect starts to interfere.

3.2 PERCEPTUAL MODES

These illustrations show the enormous power of the memory capacity, which
momentarily insights into how an individual's perceptions, feelings and thoughts
could become a reality of a person's decisions, actions and general behaviour. A
major research area for the next century for science, is probably to discover how ex-
periences can be translated into processes of understanding observed sensations,
apprehended with the mind process and how the mind interprets these sensations.
These perceptions are frequently used in different situations. We have to comprise
the perceptual behaviour, in deciding and follow what the given behaviour psy-
chology or social rules and codes is consistent in order to act and interact according
to the surrounding code.

3.2.1 Social Perception
Social perception is considered to be the perceiving of attributes, characteristics,
and behaviour of a social environment, Augoustinos (2006). The quality of social
perception is the process of forming impressions of an individual or a group of
people as exemplified in Fig. 3.3. The formed perception is based on available
information of the environment, previous attitudes about the perceptual stimuli,
mixed with a current portion of stress, sensitivity and the mood. When forming
impression of other individuals or groups, we have a tendency to work under cer-
tain social perception biases. For example, in the social bias, named the Halo effect,
humans tend to perceive a nice person as being good in the sense that the person
possess desirable personality features such as friendliness, sociability and intel-
ligence than person(s) considered as less attractive. A positive perceptual effect
gives rise to subsequently positive qualities. Indeed the expression “You never get
a second chance to make the first impression” in this context is quite true.
In another type of social bias, named the Rosenthal effect, we tend to make
distinctions about the strength of the influence of our expectations. If we consider
that our bias about other people is confirmed, we then tend to operate under cer-
tain bias perception.