What is visual perception?

Visual perception refers to the brain’s ability to make sense of what the eyes see. This is not the same as visual acuity which refers to how clearly a person sees. Good visual perceptual skills are important for many every day skills such as reading, writing, completing puzzles, cutting, drawing, etc.

Psychologists distinguish between two types of processes in perception: bottom-up processing and top-down processing.

Bottom-up processing is also known as data-driven processing, because perception begins with the stimulus itself. Processing is carried out in one direction from the retina to the visual cortex, with each successive stage in the visual pathway carrying out ever more complex analysis of the input.

Top-down processing refers to the use of contextual information in pattern recognition. For example, understanding difficult handwriting is easier when reading complete sentences than when reading single and isolated words. This is because the meaning of the surrounding words provide a context to aid understanding.

Perception is being able to interpret the information that your different senses receive from your surroundings. This ability to interpret information depends on your particular cognitive processes and prior knowledge. Visual perception could be defined as the ability to interpret the information that our eyes receive. The result of this information being interpreted and received by the brain is what we call visual perception, vision, or sight. Visual perception is a process that starts in our eyes:

• Photo-reception: The light rays reach our pupils and activate the receptor cells in the retina.

• Transmission and basic processing: The signals made by these cells are transmitted through the optic nerve toward the brain. It first goes through the optic chiasma (where the optic nerves cross, making the information received from the right field of vision go to the left hemisphere, and information received from the left field of vision go to the right hemisphere), and is then relayed to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus.

• Finally, the visual information that our eyes receive is sent to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe.