Factors that Influence Visual Perception and Visual Cognition

Factors that Influence Visual Perception and Visual Cognition
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Introduction
Human beings have five sense organs (sensory receptors) that are critical to receiving information from the environment. They include the eye (sight), ear (hearing), nose (smell), tongue (taste), and skin (touch). These senses enable individuals to make contact with the world and all that is in it. Each organ is a fragment of the sensory system, which receives sensory inputs and transmits sensory information to the brain. The process of picking up information through the sensory receptors is called sensation. Once a sensation takes place, interpretation of the sensory information precedes. This is referred to as perception. The brain's prime portal to the environment is sight or vision. In psychology, visual perception is the brain's ability to receive, interpret, and act on visual stimuli. Therefore, research on visual perception and cognition is critical to not only understanding the brain's mechanisms of sight but also comprehending how individuals optimize the tasks guided by sight. This study seeks to critically assess the factors that affect or influence visual perception and cognition. Examples of aspects that influence visual perception comprise culture and emotions. Others include visual cognition during social interactions and how information from emotion, prediction, audition, and cognition influences visual processing and visual perception in pathological and healthy aging. The study begins by discussing the concept of visual perception and cognition as a building block toward understanding these factors.
Overview of Visual Perception and Visual Cognition
The primary portal between the environment and the brain is sight or vision. For one to comprehend insights into the environment, they must see it for the brain to interpret. The mental process or action of acquiring or accumulating knowledge or understanding of an aspect within the environment through sensory organs, experiences, or thoughts is called cognition. It is the unconscious or conscious process by which knowledge is obtained via perception, judgment, reasoning, conceiving, and recognition. Thus, visual cognition is the accumulation of knowledge via the assessment of sensory information from the eyes through the optical nerves to the brain. Since sight is the prime sensory organ, visual perception is vital for cognition. Various researchers have broadly defined visual perception. It is often used interchangeably with visual processing. Kurtz (2006) defined visual perception as the cognition process of seeing something (such as an item or writing), absorbing it, and organizing it in the brain to make sense. A typical example of the importance of visual perception in cognition is reading, where one sees the writings in a book, and the brain makes sense of words.
Visual perception is necessary because it can help one to mentally interpret and manipulate any visual information received from their surroundings. It enables people to respond based on the environment's demands. Orloff (2004) explains that visual perception is the brain's ability to receive visual stimuli, interpret them, and ponder on them to deduce meaning and is based on seven key elements. These aspects comprise discrimination (the ability to discriminate or distinguish the differences and similarities of objects in terms of color, shape, or size), memory (the ability to remember an object after it has been removed from one's visual field), and spatial relationship (ability to distinguish items based on their spatial locations. Examples include closure (the ability to recognize an item or shape that is partially complete), constancy (the ability to discern similar objects, but of different colors, shapes, or locations and can easily and consistently match them), ground or figure (the ability to discern the form of an object after it is partially hidden) and sequential memory (the ability to recall items in a sequence after they are removed from a person's visual field).
Gordon (2004) explains that interpreting the surrounding environment takes place through color vision, daytime vision (photopic), night vision (scotopic), and twilight vision (mesopic). He argues that the amount of light in the environment influences an individual's visual perception. Cavanagh (2011) adds that visual cognition is highly dependent on the visual perception skills of attention, memory, discrimination, and learning. Attention skill ensures that all distractions are removed from the surrounding environment and an individual focuses on a specific item or form. Visual attention enables the brain to carefully and critically assess an item to deduce valuable information about it.
Additionally, visual perception is an essential learning tool as it enables individuals to make sense of what they see. The accumulation of knowledge is highly dependent on a person's memory. For instance, long-term memory ensures that an individual vividly remembers an object after it is removed from their visual field. Generally, visual cognition cannot take place without perception. An individual must see an object, which is then transported by the optical nerves to the brain for analysis and comprehension.
Factors that Influence Visual Perception
A myriad of factors influences an individual's visual perception. These elements can either be psychological, sociocultural, or biological. They illustrate how various individuals perceive a similar object or action differently. The biological factors include genetics, physiological makeup, and aging. Physiological makeup refers to the physical structure of the sensory organs, such as the eye and the optical nerves. Moschos (2014) highlights that what and how people see items in the environment is highly dependent on the nature of the eye. In this case, the ability to visually perceive the surrounding environment is compromised when the eye is deteriorated, impacted during embryo development, or damaged due to an accident. Multiple psychological disorders also impact an individual's ability to effectively perceive an object. An example is color vision deficiency or blindness. The latter is the inability to distinguish between specific colors.
Color blindness develops due to a structural issue on the eye cones. The condition is a physiological defect as the cones are either missing or impaired. The lack of working cones makes it difficult for a person's eyes to effectively perceive light waves, resulting in difficulty distinguishing or perceiving objects' colors. Zhu et al. (2020) explain congenital and cerebral achromatopsia. Both are physiological defects that influence visual perception. The former is characterized by cone vision, as an individual can only perceive grey, white, and black colors. The latter is associated with cone abnormalities due to trauma in the cerebral cortex when an individual suffers a stroke.
Additionally, it can be caused by damage to the neural pathways of the brain and other brain organs that perceive color. Just like individuals inherit some traits from their parents, a person's visual perception is no exception. Children inherit various visual perception disorders due to their genetic traits.
A 2022 Cleveland Clinic report indicated that most common eye diseases and vision disorders are transmitted from one generation to the next via genetic makeup. Similarly, Mathebula (2012) explained that many eye infections occur during childhood and infancy, while others appear later during childhood. Some inherited visual perception disorders are easily treated and managed via therapy, surgery, and prescription contact lenses or glasses. However, others are severe and lead to blindness. In children, inherited visual problems comprise strabismus, amblyopia, astigmatism, and refractive errors, like myopia or near-sightedness and hyperopia or far-sightedness). Other genetic disorders that impact visual perception include congenital visual disorders, Retinis pigmentosa, and color vision deficiency.
According to the Association of British Dispensing Opticians (2018), although rare, congenital visual disorders are present at birth. They are transferred via genes and emerge from deficiencies and diseases during pregnancy and prenatal underdevelopment. These disorders include congenital glaucoma, congenital achromatopsia, optic nerve hypoplasia (underdeveloped optic nerves), and congenital cataracts. These visual deficiencies can only be managed when detected early, as no known cure exists. According to the National Eye Institute (2022), Retinis pigmentosa is a degenerative retinal infection that results in the gradual depletion of peripheral vision and night blindness. It is caused by the harmful exchange of genes responsible for relaying information on the production of proteins critical to the photoreceptor cells. The harmful exchange of genes makes the proteins dysfunctional and toxic, damaging the rods and cones (in the retina) responsible for seeing at night or in dim lighting.
Tulver (2019) explains that color blindness (vision deficiency) is a condition that makes individuals perceive color differently from others. There are cones in the retina responsible for long or red, short or blue, and medium or green light wavelengths. People with vision deficiency have long, short, and medium light wavelengths either functioning incorrectly or missing. The National Eye Institute (2019) explains three color vision deficiencies. They include monochromacy (severe as an individual is restricted to one set of cones, which detects light, but not color), dichromacy (where two of the three cones in the retina are functioning), and trichromacy (where any of the three cones in the retina are altered, resulting in an impaired sense of color).
Men are more likely to have color blindness due to the deficiency in the X-chromosome (which is only one), while women are unlikely to be color blind due to the presence of two X-chromosomes. The second chromosome compensates for the deficiency in the first. Aging also impacts visual perception in various ways (more is discussed later). All the above visual deficiencies are physiological because they are triggered by the alteration or the abnormal development of the eye's structure responsible for receiving light waves. They impact visual perception, as individuals will only see what their eyes allow them to see, and the brain will interpret them as such.
Psychological influences result in a perceptual set. This is the perception of a stimulus based on predisposed preconceptions (Balcetis & Lassiter, 2010). The psychological factors influencing visual perception emanate from the mental state, personality traits, past experiences, and the surrounding environment. Generally, how an individual feels at a particular time influences their perception of the environment, people, and objects around them. A person's personality affects how they perceive, process, and interpret visual information. For instance, a m...