Perceptual Processing Theories and Gestalt - MCAT Psychological and Social Foundations

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Perception is the process that occurs when the brain processes sensory stimuli and translates them in a way that a person can understand. Perception is not usually a conscious process; furthermore, sensing a particular stimulus is a different process than the interpretation (i.e. perception) of that stimulus.

A team of perception researchers decided to test the difference between sensation and perception by testing the reading speed of a paragraph in three conditions. In the first condition, the researchers correctly spelled the words in the sentences. In the second condition, they had the same words with the letters randomly jumbled within each word; however, the first and last letter of each word remained in the correct position. In the third condition, researchers used the same words and randomly jumbled every letter in each word, including the first and last letters. Sample sentences from the paragraphs are below:

1). Mary crossed the street to purchase a cookie after lunch.

2). Mray csorsed the sretet to pruachse a ckooie atfer lnuch.

3). Rmya rsocsed het teerst to curaepshs a okocei feart culhn.

The researchers timed how long it took for the participants to correctly say a sentence fluently. They found that participants in condition three took significantly more time to read the sentence fluently, whereas they found no significant difference in the average amount of time it took participants to read the passage in condition one compared to condition two.

Suppose the researchers wanted to test the Gestalt principle of proximity. In order to do this, they might consider which of the following options?

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Answer

The Gestalt principle of proximity suggests that the closer objects are to one another, the more likely they will be grouped together. This is why we leave larger spaces between words than we do letters. Testing if varying the amount of space between words impacted reading fluency would be testing proximity whereas varying color, font, or size would be testing the Gestalt principle of similarity, which posits that objects that are visually similar (in size shape or color) are likely to be grouped together.

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