Testing and Identifying Perception

Today's session was based on discovering and interpreting perception using specific tests carried out by groups in the class. The first involved testing three different types of Coca-Cola: normal Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Three people volunteered to test the drinks and they were asked to distinguish each type. They all guessed the normal Coke variety correctly, but the responses given for the other two were mixed. They were then asked to state which one they would normally choose to drink and whether this was the same as the one they preferred in the experiment. In our group we chose chocolate as our product to investigate. We picked 5 different types of chocolate: Waitrose Belgian Chocolate, Asda Milk Chocolate, Tesco-more expensive range, Tesco-middle range and Tesco Value. We asked 5 individuals to test each type of chocolate then state which one they preferred and which one they disliked. We also asked them to decide which one they thought was the most expensive and the cheapest. After gathering the results from the experiment, it was interesting to see that not every person had chosen the same brand of chocolate as their favourite. The most preferred appeared to be the most expensive Waitrose chocoloate and the cheapest Tesco Value chocolate. The type that most people disliked was the more expensive range from Tesco. If we were to carry out this experiment again in the future, we could start by decreasing the total number of brands of chocolate used for testing from five to three. We would also supply some water to help wash down the chocolate. We could then have two different tests, one where the volunteers know which type of chocolate they are testing and another one where they are blind-folded. We could then compare the results to see if their opinions and perceptions of the different brands and packaging changes.

A test was carried out using the sense of smell. This involved different types of men's aftershave and women's perfume. Four people, 2 boys and 2 girls, were chosen to carry this experiment which aimed to see if people could distinguish different types without knowing the brands. It was interesting to see on collection of the results that in most cases the volunteers could not distinguish between the men's and women's perfumes. The last test carried out incorporated the sense of sight and the sense of hearing. A number of television adverts had been chosen but had been altered from their original state by inserting music clips over the top. We were to decide which version we thought suited the advert best and which one would be most effective for the product it was advertising. This was a very inventive and original test and it was interesting to see how the type of music used in an advert can really influence your desicision and opinion on the product.

Gestalt psychologists working in the 1930's researched the concept that animals and humans are bron with built-in ways of seeing and organising the world. They argue that for our ancestors the world was a dangerous place to be born into and babies needed to understand as quickly as possible what was going on around them. This ability to take limited information and attempt to make sense of it has become known as Gestalt or Closure and it stays with us for the whole of our lives.

Gestalt Psychology is a school of thought maintaining that people derive meaning from the totality of a set of stimuli rather that from an individual stimulus. Gestalt is a German word that roughly means whole, pattern or configuration, and this perspective is best summarised by the saying 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'. There are 4 main principles that are based on work in Gestalt Psychology, these include: the principle for closure which implies that consumers tend to perceive an incomplete picture as complete. The principle of similarity that tells us consumers tend to group together objects that share similar physical characteristics. The figure-ground principle is where one part of a stimulus will dominate while other parts reced into the background. The final principle is stimulus ambiguity which is where a stimulus is said to be ambiguous when it does not correspond to an immediately recognisable shape or form.

Optical Illusions

Optical illusions are a good example of the way our brains take an object and perceive it in a way that makes sense to us. They test our visual perception and show that in many cases this type of perception is not always reliable.

An optical illusion occurs because the different cells and receptors of the eye perceive images and colors at different rates, which sometimes result in a false image being relayed to the brain. The brain receives information from receptors in the eye, but really, the eye only perceives a certain quantity of visual information at any given time, while our brain continuously decodes, constructs and reconstructs visual information, giving us the illusion of continuous sight. The right combination of colors, shapes, spatial relations, and other stimuli viewed by the eyes and reported to the brain during the relays of information can achieve the effect of an optical illusion.