1

Dr. RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA NATIONAL

LAW UNIVERSITY

PSYCHOLOGY

FINAL DRAFT
On
ROLE OF ATTENTION, MOTIVES AND EMOTIONS IN
PERCEPTION

Submitted to Submitted by

Ms. Tanya Dixit Vimal Babu

Asst. Prof. of Psychology Roll No.170101160
1st Year (1st Semester)

2017-2018
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The successful completion of this project is the result of constant and rigorous hard work of
weeks.

First and foremost, I express my deep gratitude to my teacher, Ms. Monika Srivastava who
was always there to guide me with the project outlines and whose effective sense of
understanding of the subject and imparting the same to me goes a long way down to the
eventual compilation of the project.

I am thankful to the Honourable Vice Chancellor, Prof. Gurdeep Singh and the Dean
(Academics), Prof (Dr.) C.M. Jariwala, who provided me all possible resources for the
successful completion of this project. Without their guidelines, the project would not have
worked successfully and effectively.

I would also like to thank other college staff, notably the print out department.At last but not
the least, I am thankful to my parents and friends who encouraged and motivated me to make
the best possible efforts for the completion of this project.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT…………………………………………….2
 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….4
 PERCEPTION…………………………………………………………5
 ATTENTION……………………………………………………….....9
 MOTIVES……………………………………………………………..10
 EMOTIONS……………………………………………………………12
 ROLE OF ATTENTION IN PERCEPTION………………………….13
 ROLE OF MOTIVES IN PERCEPTION……………………………..14
 ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN PERCEPTION……………………………15
 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..16
 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………..17
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INTRODUCTION

This paper deals with the perception and how the various factors like attention, motives and
emotions affect the perception. This paper deals with the complete study of attention,
motives, emotions and perception.

Perception is the process of recognizing and interpreting sensory stimuli. Perception can be

defined as our recognition and interpretation of sensory information. Perception also includes
how we respond to the information. We can think of perception as a process where we take in
sensory information from our environment and use that information in order to interact with
our environment. Perception allows us to take the sensory information in and make it into
something meaningful.

Attention is the concentration of the mind on a single person, object or task. The process of
selectively responding to a stimulus or range of stimuli is called attention. Thus, attention
refers to all those processes by which we perceive selectively. Attention is a central process
and perception is not possible without attentional processes. That means attention precedes
perception. Attentional processes serve various functions in the organization of our
perceptions and other cognitive functions.

 Our perception is largely guided by our immediate needs and motives. We attend to and
organize our sensory inputs in a manner that match our needs. The studies in general ,
maintain that people who are hungry, thirsty or sexually aroused are likely to pay attention to
events in the environment, which will satisfy their needs.

Emotions also play a role in shaping our perceptions. Our emotions can also influence what
we perceive. According to Barbara Frederickson, negative emotions generally narrow our
perceptual focus or spotlight. Positive emotions can actually broaden the scope of attention.
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PERCEPTION

We live and deal with a three dimensional world which contains objects of different shapes
and forms, sizes, and colours. Generally, our experience of the external world is quite
accurate and error free. However, we do encounter illusions (e.g. perceiving a rope in the
night as snake). To survive and live in this world we must get accurate information from our
environment. This information is gathered by our sense organs, ten in all. Eight of these are
external (vision, audition, smell, taste, touch, warmth, cold, and pain) and two internal or
deep senses (e.g., vestibular and kinesthetic).

Multiple and complex nature of stimulation is available to us from the external world and
with the operation of attentional processes we selectively receive some information and filter
out the rest.

All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from
physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. For example, vision
involves light striking the retina of the eye, smell is mediated by odor molecules, and hearing
involves pressure waves.
Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it's also shaped by the
recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention.
Perception can be split into two processes, (1) processing the sensory input, which transforms
these low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object
recognition), (2) processing which is connected with a person's concepts and expectations (or
knowledge) and selective mechanisms (attention) that influence perception.
Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems
mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.
Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th Century, psychology's understanding of
perception has progressed by combining a variety of
techniques. Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical
qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies the brain
mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally,
in terms of the information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to
which sensory qualities such as sound, smell or colour exist in objective reality rather than in
the mind of the perceiver.
Although the senses were traditionally viewed as passive receptors, the study
of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain's perceptual systems
actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There is still active debate
about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous
to science, or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process
unnecessary.
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The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable,
even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and
animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds
of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps, mapping some
aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are
interconnected and influence each other. For instance, taste is strongly influenced by smell.
Psychologist Jerome Bruner has developed a model of perception. According to him, people
go through the following process to form opinions:

1. When we encounter an unfamiliar target, we are open to different informational cues

and want to learn more about the target.
2. In the second step, we try to collect more information about the target. Gradually, we
encounter some familiar cues which help us categorize the target.
3. At this stage, the cues become less open and selective. We try to search for more cues
that confirm the categorization of the target. We also actively ignore and even distort
cues that violate our initial perceptions. Our perception becomes more selective and
we finally paint a consistent picture of the target.
According to Alan Saks and Gary Johns, there are three components to perception.

1. The Perceiver, the person who becomes aware about something and comes to a final
understanding. There are 3 factors that can influence his or her perceptions:
experience, motivational state and finally emotional state. In different motivational or
emotional states, the perceiver will react to or perceive something in different ways.
Also in different situations he or she might employ a "perceptual defence" where they
tend to "see what they want to see".
2. The Target. This is the person who is being perceived or judged. "Ambiguity or lack
of information about a target leads to a greater need for interpretation and addition."
3. The Situation also greatly influences perceptions because different situations may call
for additional information about the target.

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's
eye. Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as
their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous
image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level.
This confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such
as camouflage, and also in biological mimicry, for example by European peacock butterflies,
whose wings bear eyespots that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous
predator.
There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay", to allow nerve
impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals.
Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative laws in
psychology are Weber's law – which states that the smallest noticeable difference in stimulus
intensity is proportional to the intensity of the reference – and Fechner's law which quantifies
the relationship between the intensity of the physical stimulus and its perceptual counterpart
(for example, testing how much darker a computer screen can get before the viewer actually
notices). The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its
emphasis on holistic approach.
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FEATURES OF PERCEPTION

Constancy
Perceptual constancy is the ability of perceptual systems to recognize the same object from
widely varying sensory inputs. For example, individual people can be recognized from views,
such as frontal and profile, which form very different shapes on the retina. A coin looked at
face-on makes a circular image on the retina, but when held at angle it makes an elliptical
image. In normal perception these are recognized as a single three-dimensional object.
Without this correction process, an animal approaching from the distance would appear to
gain in size. One kind of perceptual constancy is color constancy: for example, a white piece
of paper can be recognized as such under different colors and intensities of light. Another
example is roughness constancy: when a hand is drawn quickly across a surface, the touch
nerves are stimulated more intensely. The brain compensates for this, so the speed of contact
does not affect the perceived roughness. Other constancies include melody, odor, brightness
and words. These constancies are not always total, but the variation in the percept is much
less than the variation in the physical stimulus. The perceptual systems of the brain achieve
perceptual constancy in a variety of ways, each specialized for the kind of information being
processed.

Grouping
The principles of grouping (or Gestalt laws of grouping) are a set of principles in psychology,
first proposed by Gestalt psychologists to explain how humans naturally perceive objects as
organized patterns and objects. Gestalt psychologists argued that these principles exist
because the mind has an innate disposition to perceive patterns in the stimulus based on
certain rules. These principles are organized into six categories: proximity, similarity,
closure, good continuation, common fate and good form.

The principle of proximity states that, all else being equal, perception tends to group stimuli
that are close together as part of the same object, and stimuli that are far apart as two separate
objects.

The principle of similarity states that, all else being equal, perception lends itself to seeing
stimuli that physically resemble each other as part of the same object, and stimuli that are
different as part of a different object. This allows for people to distinguish between adjacent
and overlapping objects based on their visual texture and resemblance.

 The principle of closure refers to the mind's tendency to see complete figures or forms even
if a picture is incomplete, partially hidden by other objects, or if part of the information
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needed to make a complete picture in our minds is missing. For example, if part of a shape's
border is missing people still tend to see the shape as completely enclosed by the border and
ignore the gaps.

The principle of good continuation makes sense of stimuli that overlap: when there is an
intersection between two or more objects, people tend to perceive each as a single
uninterrupted object.

The principle of common fate groups stimuli together on the basis of their movement. When
visual elements are seen moving in the same direction at the same rate, perception associates
the movement as part of the same stimulus. This allows people to make out moving objects
even when other details, such as color or outline, are obscured. The principle of good
form refers to the tendency to group together forms of similar shape, pattern, color, etc. Later
research has identified additional grouping principles.

Contrast effects
A common finding across many different kinds of perception is that the perceived qualities of
an object can be affected by the qualities of context. If one object is extreme on some
dimension, then neighbouring objects are perceived as further away from that extreme.
"Simultaneous contrast effect" is the term used when stimuli are presented at the same time,
whereas "successive contrast" applies when stimuli are presented one after another.
The contrast effect was noted by the 17th Century philosopher John Locke, who observed
that lukewarm water can feel hot or cold, depending on whether the hand touching it was
previously in hot or cold water. In the early 20th Century, Wilhelm Wundt identified contrast
as a fundamental principle of perception, and since then the effect has been confirmed in
many different areas. These effects shape not only visual qualities like color and brightness,
but other kinds of perception, including how heavy an object feels. One experiment found
that thinking of the name "Hitler" led to subjects rating a person as more hostile. Whether a
piece of music is perceived as good or bad can depend on whether the music heard before it
was pleasant or unpleasant. For the effect to work, the objects being compared need to be
similar to each other: a television reporter can seem smaller when interviewing a tall
basketball player, but not when standing next to a tall building. In the brain, brightness
contrast exerts effects on both neuronal firing rates and neuronal synchrony.
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ATTENTION

When you walk through a busy street, a large number of stimuli bombard your sense organs,
but you can take in and use only a very small number of stimuli. For example, a number of
people cris-cross each other wearing different colour dresses, cars and buses pass through on
the nearby road, shops and buildings also attract your attention. However, only a small and
selected part of the available stimulation is registered by an individual for processing and the
rest is filtered out. This process of selectively responding to a stimulus or range of stimuli is
called attention. Thus, attention refers to all those processes by which we perceive
selectively.

Attentional processes serve the tuner function in filtering information selectively for further
processing that finally leads to perception.

Attention is a central process and perception is not possible without attentional processes.
That means attention precedes perception. Attentional processes serve various functions in
the organization of our perceptions and other cognitive functions.

The various functions of attention are :

1. Alerting function

2. Selective function

3. Limited capacity channel

4. Vigilance
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MOTIVES

A motive is something that causes us to act or behave in order to reach a a goal or desired
endpoint. It comes from the latin word that means 'moving'. A motive is the reason why you
do. 
For example, a motive for exercise is better health and weight loss. In criminology a motive
is the reason an individual committed a crime or offense. For instance, the motive for
someone who robbed a store is most likely that they needed money.

The psychological motives are also known as personal motives. These motives are personal
in the sense that they are very specific to the person psychological make up of the individual.

The goal here may be fulfillment of a want or a need. Whenever a need arises the organism is
driven to fulfil that want or need. If there is no need in the organism, there will be no
behaviour. For example, Horse and water. Horse does not drink water unless it has thirst or if
it is not motivated. Unlike the external stimuli, the motives are limited.

The behaviour to fulfil such needs is mechanical and alike in all the organisms. Hunger is a
motive which stimulates the organism to have food. We develop hunger when the food that
was taken earlier is exhausted. The need for food drives us to go in search of food and to have
it. Here the hunger motive not only initiated the action, but also continued until the goal
(having food) is reached. The motives are powerful forces.

They do not allow us to stop our action or behaviour until the need is satisfied. Hence, they
are called the ‘dynamos’ of behaviour.

Types of Motives:

Biological Motivation and Homeostasis:

Biological motives are called as physiological motives. These motives are essential for the
survival of the organism. Such motives are triggered when there is imbalancement in the
body. The body always tends to maintain a state of equilibrium called “Homeostasis”- in
many of its internal physiological processes.

This balance is very essential for the normal life. Homeostasis helps to maintain internal
physiological processes at optimal levels. The nutritional level, fluid level, temperature level,
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etc., are maintained at certain optimal level or homeostasis levels. When there is some
variation in these levels the individual is motivated for restoring the state of equilibrium.

 Social Motives:
Physiological motives discussed above pertain to both animals as well as human beings, but
the social motives are specific only to human beings. These are called social motives, because
they are learnt in social groups as a result of interaction with the family and society. That is
why their strength differs from one individual to another. Many social motives are recognised
by psychologists.

 Personal Motives:
In addition to the above said physiological and social motives, there are some other motives
which are allied with both of the above said motives. These are highly personalized and very
much individualized motives.
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EMOTIONS
Emotion is often defined as a complex state of feeling that results in physical and
psychological changes that influence thought and behavior.

Emotionality is associated with a range of psychological phenomena, including

temperament, personality, mood, and motivation. According to author David G. Meyers,
human emotion involves "...physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious
experience."

According to the book, "Discovering Psychology," "An emotion is a complex psychological

state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological
response, and a behavioral or expressive response."

In addition to understanding exactly what emotions are, researchers have also tried to identify
and classify the different types of emotions. In 1972, psychologist Paul Eckman suggested
that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout human cultures: fear, disgust,
anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness. In 1999, he expanded this list to include a number of
other basic emotions, including embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride,
satisfaction, and amusement.

During the 1980s, Robert Plutchik introduced another emotion classification system known
as the "wheel of emotions." This model demonstrated how different emotions can be
combined or mixed together, much the way an artist mixes primary colors to create other
colors. Plutchik suggested that there are 8 primary emotional dimensions: happiness vs.
sadness, anger vs. fear, trust vs. disgust, and surprise vs. anticipation.

These emotions can then be combined in a variety of ways. For example, happiness and
anticipation might combine to create excitement.
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ROLE OF ATTENTION IN PERCEPTION

Perception and attention are two concepts that are related to the cognitive development of
human beings. Both stem from the ability to consciously control and direct the mental
process in connection to external stimuli, which may be physical, visual or from stored
memory in connection to events. As such, the relationship between perception and attention
is the fact that perception is the ability to make sense of the environment and surroundings,
while attention is the ability to concentrate on any of the perceived stimuli.

A connection between perception and attention stems from the ability of human beings to
choose what internal or external stimuli to allocate their attention toward. This is a very
important ability due to the barrage of information with which human beings have to contend
with on a daily basis. By giving their attention to select stimuli, the individual is able to focus
his or her attention on a particular stimuli while storing away the superfluous ones in either
the long- or short-term memory for future reference.

For instance, if a young boy is walking through a park on a sunny day, he will notice a lot of
objects that will serve as a form of stimuli. Some of those will only be noticed marginally,
while others will stand out in varying degrees of focus, commanding the attention of the boy.
For instance, such external stimuli will include the warmth from the sun, a slight breeze,
flowers in the park, and other forms of stimuli. The connection between perception and
attention can be seen in the stimuli on which the boy chooses to focus his attention.

For instance, he might marginally notice everything described above, but he might choose a
golden retriever or an ice-cream truck as the focus of his attention. Some of the other objects
might be stored in his short-term memory, but the ice-cream truck and golden retriever will
stand out in sharp focus, because he chose to give those particular visual stimuli his attention.
If the young boy is interviewed a year from that time, he might partially remember the other
factors but the memory of the golden retriever and other objects he paid attention to will
probably come easier to him. As such, perception and attention are intertwined by the effect
that the person experiencing the stimuli allocates his or her attention to the objects that he or
she perceives.
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ROLE OF MOTIVES IN PERCEPTION

A number of studies was conducted in the late 1940s and 1950s to show the impact of
motives and needs on perception. Despite methodological imitations and inconsistencies,
most of those studies point to the fact that our perception is largely guided by our immediate
needs and motives. We attend to and organize our sensory inputs in a manner that match our
needs. These studies in general maintain that people who are hungry, thirsty or sexually
aroused are likely to pay attention to events in the environment, which will satisfy their
needs. This viewpoint was known as the "new look" in perception.

Human perception of others is not constant but it changes according to many factors and
one of these factors is the person's mood.

When our emotions change different chemicals are released into our bodies, these
chemicals force us to see the world through a new lens and as a result our perception
changes.

In my book Attraction psychology explained i explained how women change their opinion

about men's physical attractiveness during different stages of their menstrual cycles.

The hormonal changes that take place inside their bodies force them to perceive
attractiveness differently.

How our emotions change our perception of the world

Here are few examples that show how our emotions change our perception of life events:

 1) Stress and annoying people: If someone asked for help more than once while you
were relaxed then most probably you wont judge that person negatively however you
are much more likely to label that person "annoying" if he did the same while you
were stressed. Because stress makes people less tolerant the way they judge others
change when they experience it
 2) Depression and negativity: During depressive phases people become more
inclined to negative thoughts than positive ones. Expecting the worst, losing hope and
believing that there is no way out are typical thoughts that depressed people get.
Humor loses its effect as well because the way depressed people judge jokes become
different as a result of their depression
 3) Disgust and Morality: One study have found that people who feel disgusted
became more sensitive to what's morally wrong. In other words if a person became
disgusted he might have less tolerance for what's not morally acceptable.
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ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN PERCEPTION

Your emotions will drive the decisions you make today, and your success may depend upon
your ability to understand and interpret them. When an emotion is triggered in your brain,
your nervous systems responds by creating feelings in your body (what many people refer to
as a "gut feeling") and certain thoughts in your mind. A great deal of your decisions are
informed by your emotional responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to
appraise and summarize an experience and inform your actions. But if an emotion is
triggered, just how much should you pay attention to your visceral response and the thoughts
it creates?

Emotions are not particularly sophisticated or precise, but their speed and utility make up
for what they lack in sophistication and precision. Emotions, when they are not disordered,
provide information about your circumstances in a simple, quick way that does not involve
a lot of cognition (thinking about it). So they attempt to tell you if a situation is optimal or
not aligned with your goal, and how you might approach it. For example, imagine that you
are negotiating a contract and begin to get anxious. If something doesn't feel right it is your
emotional system that is informing you to further evaluate the situation. You can be
disrupted by your anxiety or you can take a look at it: Does the other person remind your
emotional brain of someone in the past who took advantage of you? Is this person doing
the same thing or is it just a particular mannerism he has that triggered your anxious
response? Is your anxious response a reaction to the other person or to yourself, such as
your fear of success or failure? Similarly, you may have a reaction to a "pushy"
salesperson--often an angry, disgusted, or anxious emotional response--because your
emotions are informing you to protect yourself.

You may think that the best course of action is to suppress or ignore an intense emotion
rather than figure it out. But why ignore an emotion that has evolved over thousands of
years? Emotions serve a purpose, informing you, the operator of your body, what to do.
We're constantly faced with an abundance of information that we must process--a lot of
stimulation to reflect upon. You do not have time to process all information in a reflective
fashion but your brain processes it passively and unconsciously. If your brain comes across
something it appraises as a "red flag," you'll be sent a general, vague alert in the form of
the feelings and thoughts that are created by an emotion. This somewhat imprecise signal
alerts you to pay attention. In this way, your emotions serve as a cueing system--an
attention directing system associated with physiological changes that can prepare you to
take action. But it is also not a very smart system because it has many false alarms. There
are emotional misfires. Thus you need to evaluate your response to see if it is appropriate.
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CONCLUSION

The attention, emotions and motives affect the perception in a very wide sense. They can the
actual sense of the stimuli which a individual is perceiving. Emotions have tremendous action
potential. Yet the drive that emotions provide, particularly in the workplace, is sometimes
experienced as stress related to task completion, time management, or productivity, rather
than potential for decisive action. Consider, for example, how people respond differently in
their approach to completing a project. Unsatisfied needs or motives stimulate individuals
and may exert a strong influence on their perception. For examples, two groups of subjects –
One group who is deprived of food for about 24 hours and the other group which had food
enough were shown the blurred pictures and asked to explain the contents. The first group
perceived the blurred image as food far more frequently than the other group. People needs
and motives thus play a big part in the perceptual process. From a large number of stimuli
that are available in the external world, attentional processes limit the reception of stimuli
selectively. Thus, attentional processes serve the tuner function in filtering information
selectively for further processing that finally leads to perception.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 http://www.eruptingmind.com/motives-and-drives-in-psychology
 psychologydiscussion.net/motive/types-of-motives-biological-social-and-personal-
motives-psychology
 http://www.preservearticles.com/201104195509/psychological-motives.html
 https://www.verywell.com/what-are-emotions-2795178
 https://dailyddose.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/what-is-the-connection-between-
perception-and-attention/
 https://www.2knowmyself.com/How_your_emotions_change_your_perception_of_th
e_world
 Introduction to psychology by ROBERT A.BARON
 An introduction to psychology by MORGAN AND KING