Have you read something, continued reading and thought, wait, that doesn’t make sense? So, you go back and realise you’ve read something entirely different to what you read was written. Why do we do this? I’ll give you a hint – perception.
Perception is our ability to experience through senses such as tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing and touching objects.
Even if two people were standing in the same spot and looking at the same object, they would perceive the objects differently. This is because our beliefs, thoughts, experiences, cognitive abilities, culture, and many other factors influence how we perceive things. The Bruner and Minturn Study of Perceptual Set attempted to investigate empirically how expectations influence perception.
- We will start by looking at what the perceptual set means and provide a quick summary of the Bruner and Minturn study.
- Moving on, we will explore some factors, such as expectation, which research has suggested influence our perception.
- We will delve into the aim of Bruner and Minturn's study, the procedure of the research and the Bruner and Minturn study results to see if the study provides supporting evidence of expectation influencing perceptual sets.
- Finally, we will go through some Bruner and Minturn evaluation points.
Fig. 1, According to the Perceptual Set theory, many factors affect how we perceive the world.
What is a Perceptual Set?
As we discussed earlier, perception is the information that is processed that we receive from our senses. Perception is an individualistic, active process influenced by our subjective experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviour.
A perceptual set is the tendency to perceive something in a particular way due to other factors (past experiences or current situations/contexts); when perceiving the environment, we tend to notice some things and ignore others.
An example of a perceptual set can be seen in if you are thirsty. If shopping for clothes whilst thirsty, you'll be more likely to notice drink machines or stores offering drinks you like.
In our everyday life, we see an enormous amount of information. If our brain processes everything that we sense, the brain would probably not be able to keep up, and we would be exhausted. This is where our perceptual set comes in; it stops our brain from over-working by taking over tasks and improving the efficiency of perception.
Although many factors affect our perceptual set, today, we will focus on understanding how our expectations can influence our perceptual set.
Aim of Bruner and Minturn's study
Bruner and Minturn's study aimed to identify if expectations influenced the participant's perceptual set. The aim was investigated by exploring if priming participants to a stimulus object affected how they perceived an ambiguous figure.
Priming is a cognitive technique that manipulates and affects our thinking and behaviour. The priming technique involves showing someone a stimulus followed by later related stimuli. As the stimuli are related, it usually causes cognitive biases and influences responses, thoughts and behaviours.
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