The
percept is a perceived form of external stimuli or their absence. Vivid dreams could also be considered as a form of perception without a clear source of external stimuli. The term is primarily used in philosophy and psychology as sense-datum to explain
perceptionIn philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade,...
.
It is important to discern percept from stimuli or their absence. Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely does a single stimulus translate into a percept.
The
percept is a perceived form of external stimuli or their absence. Vivid dreams could also be considered as a form of perception without a clear source of external stimuli. The term is primarily used in philosophy and psychology as sense-datum to explain
perceptionIn philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade,...
.
It is important to discern percept from stimuli or their absence. Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely does a single stimulus translate into a percept. Also, absence of adequate stimuli may be translated into multiple percepts, experienced randomly, one at a time, as in some sensory illusions. And the same stimuli, or absence of them, may result in different percepts depending on subject’s culture and previous experiences.
Examples on the left illustrate how the same ambiguous stimuli could give rise to more than one percept. The same lines on the left of the image can be translated into a percept of transparent cube viewed from above or one viewed from below. The shape on the right could be interpreted as a vase or as two faces facing each other.
The percept also binds sensations from all of the senses in a whole. A picture of a talking person on a TV screen, for example, is bound to the sound of speech from speakers to form a percept of a talking person.
The example of transparent cube could also be used to illustrate the difference between cognition and recognition. If we are used to seeing a cube from above much more than from below, we will recognise the transparent cube viewed from above much faster and easier. The view from below would then need a significant cognitive effort that will take a noticeable moment.
In philosophy, ambiguity of stimuli is commented upon by
Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language....
in his
Philosophical Investigations (1953), and
Rudolf ArnheimRudolf Arnheim was a German-born author, art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist. He himself said that his major books are Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye , Visual Thinking , and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts , but it is...
in
Art and Visual Perception (1954). It is also a term used in
Rudolf SteinerRudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social thinker, architect and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
's theory of knowledge, which treats the relation of percept and concept.
Marshall McLuhanHerbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.McLuhan is known for the...
declared that he was more interested in percepts than concepts.
Percept is also a term used by Bergson and Deleuze to define perception gone independent from their authors. According to Deleuze,
scienceScience is in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome...
uses percepts, while art works with
affects"Affect" is a concept used in philosophy by Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari. According to Spinoza's Ethics III, 3, Definition 3, an affect is an empowerment, and not a simple change or modification. Affects, according to Deleuze, are not simple affections, as they are independent from their subject...
and philosophy creates concepts.