A percept is the result of perception without the interpretation. Each person perceives stimuli from reality in a filtered way, forming subjective percepts of objective reality. In disorders such as paranoia, anorexia, or depression, there is a distortion of perception due to the personal filters.
What is a percept?
A percept is the result of perception without the interpretation. Each person perceives the stimuli from reality filtered and thus forms subjective percepts of objective reality. Man perceives reality with his senses. He possesses different systems of perception for this purpose: the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of depth, the sense of taste, the sense of smell, the vestibular sense and the sense of touch. Some of these senses are interoceptive senses, which primarily receive stimuli from within the body. However, the main function of the sensory systems is exteroceptive. Thus, the senses give the person a picture of situations and the environment in which he moves appropriately thanks to perception. Countless stimuli are constantly flowing into the human being. Not all of these stimuli reach his consciousness. The individual perceptual systems filter out incoming stimuli according to relevance. The result of a perception is called a percept by medicine and corresponds to the filtered stimulus product that crosses the threshold to consciousness. There are always differences between a percept and the actual situation in terms of unfiltered perception. Thus, what reaches human consciousness as a percept is never objective reality. Percepts differ from distal stimuli, which correspond to a physical-chemical object of perception. Proximal stimulus is also distinct from percepts, which corresponds to an image of the object or its parts in the receptors.
Function and task
Perception corresponds to the sensory perception of an object or subject. Perception does not include conscious apprehension and equally conscious identification. Recognition and identification only follow on from percept. Thus, percept corresponds to the stimuli that reach the brain and may correspond, for example, to a black spot on a white background. Only after the processes of perceptual processing, such as combination and summation, is the percept recognized and identified as, for example, a coffee stain on a T-shirt. Perception includes, in addition to the purely subjective percept, the neurophysiological processes of sensory perception that underlie this percept. In this context, perceptual perception may include, for example, the arrival of stimuli at the sensory cells of the perceptual apparatus, the conversion of these stimuli into bioelectrical excitation, and the migration of the stimuli into the central nervous system. Percepts are the result of filtering processes undertaken by the perceptual apparatus as a protection against stimulus overload. No human being perceives Objective Reality in this way. Any result of a perceptual process is a subjective one and is determined by filters such as the individual’s personal experience, emotional world, situational context, and socialization. Percepts are always situationally relevant, that is, they have contextual importance. Likewise, human perceptual filters are shaped by attitudes, values, interests, and experiences of the individual. For example, the percept of a particular situation contains impressions that confirm a preconceived opinion rather than impressions that contradict the preconceived opinion or expectation of a situation. Personal interests, meanwhile, direct people’s attention and influence their percepts to that extent. A person who has just had a child sees more children on the street than he did before his own was born. This connection shows how strongly one’s own experiences are involved in the filtering processes of perception and thus shape the individual’s percepts. Perceptions are always specifically experienced, subjectively experienced and consciously perceived results from a filtering process of incoming perceptual stimuli. Thus, two individuals necessarily emerge from one and the same situation with different percepts.
Illness and discomfort
Percepts are always subjective distortions of reality. Depending on what the individual has experienced in the past, his percepts can also assume absurd proportions and become consciously recognizable as distortions to outsiders.This is the case, for example, with self-image disorders such as anorexia, in which sufferers perceive themselves as overweight even though, objectively speaking, they are already significantly undernourished. People with paranoia also suffer from abnormally distorted perception. This disorder corresponds to a mental disorder with delusions, such as fears of persecution or persecutory delusions. Patients of paranoia suffer from a distorted perception of their environment, which is judged to be hostile and in extreme cases even malicious. The result of paranoia is a fearful to aggressively suspicious attitude. Patients often believe in a conspiracy against their own person. Paranoid reactions can be neurotic in nature, but can also extend to severely psychotic forms. Neurotic paranoid personalities are overly sensitive to rejection. They are very offendable and treat their environment with great suspicion. People with depression also suffer from a distortion of perception with highly negative effects. They often assume that they cannot be liked by anyone or that they are failures. These beliefs are reflected in their perceptual filters and make them form all the more perceptions that confirm their beliefs. Strongly negative thinking patterns are referred to by medical professionals as dysfunctional and lead to negative distortions of reality in virtually every case.
