Illusion to be important. In the absence of these, the light points will not appear as moving. They will appear either as one point, or as different points appearing one after another, without any experience of motion. Experience of illusions indicates that people do not always perceive the world as it is; instead they engage in its construction, sometimes based on the features of stimuli and sometimes based on their experiences in a given environment.
This point will be further made clear in the section that follows now. S OCIO -C ULTURAL I NFLUENCES ON P ERCEPTION Several psychologists have studied the processes of perception in different socio- cultural settings. The questions they try to answer through these studies are: Does perceptual organisation of people living in different cultural settings take place in an uniform manner? Are the perceptual processes universal, or they vary across different cultural settings?
Because we know, people living in different parts of the world look different, many psychologists hold the view that their ways of perceiving the world must be different in some respects. Let us examine some studies relating to perception of illusion figures and other pictorial materials. You are already familiar with Muller-Lyer and Vertical-Horizontal illusion figures. Psychologists have used these figures with several groups of people living in Europe, Africa, and many other places.
Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits carried out the most extensive study of illusion susceptibility by comparing samples from remote African villages and Western urban settings. It was found that African subjects showed greater susceptibility to horizontal-vertical illusion, whereas Western subjects showed greater susceptibility to Muller-Lyer illusion. Similar findings have been reported in other studies also. Living in dense forests the African subjects regularly experienced verticality (e.g., long trees) and developed a tendency to overestimate it.
The Westerners, who lived in Fig. . : Muller-Lyer Illusion A B Apparent Movement Illusion This illusion is experienced when some motionless pictures are projected one after another at an appropriate rate. This illusion is referred to as “ phi-phenomenon ”.
When we see moving pictures in a cinema show, we are influenced by this