Organization is the substep of perception that structures sensory impressions and generates first sense. The organization is preceded by the primary sensory impression (the sensation), with the classification of the perception taking place afterwards. In neglect, the organization of stimuli on one side of the body is disturbed.
What is the organization?
Organization is the substep of perception that structures sensory input and generates initial meaning. The perceptual process as a whole consists of various stages. These include sensation, organization, and classification. The sensation corresponds to the physiological processes of the stimulus admission in the respective sense organ. The organization is the umbrella term of first cognitive processing processes of the perceived stimuli. These first processing processes on the cognitive level combine the individual components into a coherent and cohesive overall sensory impression. The logical coherence of the sensory impression is mandatory for the third processing step. Only thanks to the organization that took place before, sensory impressions can receive a superordinate categorical meaning in the context of classification. This assignment of meaning on the basis of organization and subsequent categorization is followed by an assessment of personal meaning, which enables the stimuli to be interpreted.
Function and task
Perceptual organization gives meaning to the primary sensation of the sense organs. The stimuli received are organized by the brain into a meaningful shape. The principle of organization is to create order out of chaos. The outer world is disordered. However, since man is supposed to survive in the disordered external world on the basis of his perception, the process of perception in organization must bring order into the chaos of stimuli in order to provide man with a logical and understandable whole as a basis for reactions. Ordered things are fundamentally less dangerous than chaotic ones. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, the order of incoming stimuli in the sense of organization thus has as its goal the minimization of external sources of danger and ultimately the survival of man. Within the organization, different processes take place to structure the individual stimuli, all of which are intended to produce a clearer and more coherent overall impression. For this purpose, the organization of perception follows various laws that have proven themselves in the past and establish a logical connection between individual stimuli for humans. One of these laws is the law of similarity. Similar stimuli or things are structured into common groupings. In contrast, things or stimuli with a difference are structured into separate groupings. In addition to the law of similarity, there is a law of proximity that marks spatially close things or stimuli as belonging together. Stimuli or things far away from each other, on the other hand, are perceived as independent. Equally relevant to organization are the principle of closure and the principle of continuation, which also enable the establishment of connections between individual stimuli and things in the environment. Furthermore, the brain organizes sensory perceptions according to the principle of conciseness. This is the top principle of organization, which predominantly concerns visual perception and divides visually perceived fields into “good” shapes with simple regularities or symmetries. A final principle of organization is that of texture delineation. This refers to the formation of shapes or figures based on changes in texture, differences in intensity, or different wavelengths. For example, patches have a specific length, color, width, and orientation. At the same time, they may have line ends or line crossings. All these relationships are automatically taken into account in the organization of stimuli in order to produce a meaningful overall perception. The aforementioned laws are also known as Gestalt laws and make organization the first sense-making step in the perceptual process.
Diseases and ailments
Disorders in the organization of perception sometimes occur frequently in relation to visual perception and in this case mostly affect children or adolescents. A condition involving a generalized disorder of perceptual organization is the so-called neglect.This is the term used to describe an attention disorder that normally occurs after a hemifacial lesion of the brain. After such a lesion, the affected person neglects the stimuli on the damaged side, so that the organization into a meaningful overall picture is impaired or no longer functions at all. When a hemifacial brain lesion has caused the neglect, several sensory systems are usually affected by the phenomenon. For example, in addition to visual stimuli on the affected side, the patient may neglect body-related stimuli on the corresponding side. Neglect can be the result of lesions in different regions of the brain. Typically, the damage affects the patient in only one hemisphere of the brain and is largely located between the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. In addition, neglect occurs in rare individual cases after frontal brain lesions or has subcortical lesions of the putamen or caudate nucleus in the basal ganglia as its cause. Damage to the pulvinar within the thalamus may also lead to neglect and a correspondingly disturbed organization. Thus, the causative damage is mostly in regions of the brain known as association areas or secondary receptive cortical fields. Neglect is often associated with anosognosia due to damage to the right parietal lobe.
