Similarly, Bruner et al showed participants false playing cards for instance, black hearts and red clubs. They found that participant’s perceptual system ‘coped’ by seeing purple or brown because they expected to see the opposite. Alike to Brochet’s findings this demonstrates that experience distorts perception supporting Gregory’s theory.
The greatest support for Gregory’s theory comes from visual illusions. Gregory was able to offer the explanation that they occur due to misapplied hypothesis that would normally work in the real world but not for illusions.
However this has been criticised as it does not explain why once we know the trick of the illusion, we still continue to see the illusion. According to Gregory we should form new hypothesises.
There is also research that contradicts the indirect theory. For example many infant studies suggest infants have innate abilities to perceive depth, visual constancies and patterns. A study names ‘The Visual Cliff’ showed infants wouldn’t cross the glass table, in spite of mothers calling them, which suggests they could perceive the sudden change in depth halfway across. This would imply that perception is data-driven alone and does not use stored knowledge which contradicts Gregory’s theory.
However it should be noted that researchers have argued that these infants had plenty of sensor experience, thus could have learned perception rather than it being an inborn ability so reduces the validity of the findings.
A major criticism of Gregory’s theory is the majority of his support comes from laboratory studies. The issue is these are artificial studies and although being able to infer cause and effect it does not reflect the real world and therefore lacks ecological validity making it difficult to generalise the findings.
Overall, this theory has real life application and can help us improve our understanding of how expectations can influence our perceptions. This theory has real life application such as building computer systems which can understand real world information or in court cases where witnesses could decide the fate of the trail particularly when prejudice or bias can be factor due to perceptual sets.
Gregory also highlights the role of how nurture and the environment can influence peoples perception based on past experiences and knowledge gained. However, Gregory doesn’t focus much on the nature of perception. Some parts of perception must come naturally to us. For instance in the visual cliff experiment, infants showed they wouldn’t cross the table due to the depth perception although they were young and wouldn’t have vast knowledge on depth due to them being very young.
Lastly, the theory is reductionistic as it overemphasises the importance if expectations as most people see the world accurately most of the time. Also the theory cannot explain why we see illusions even when we know our eyes are being deceived. There is evidently a more complex system occurring which Gregory’s theory is unable to explain.
In conclusion, Gregory theory highlights how we perceive things due to expectations and previous knowledge. But the theory doesn’t account for everything and fails to explain certain things such as optical illusions and thus there must be other factors that account for perception.
by
ellouise1997hotmailcom (student)
