Which perspective is focused on perception and its influence on thinking and problem

Perception

In the early days of psychology, perception was viewed as an introspective subjective experience. Then the behaviorist approach reduced perception to external stimuli-response reactions. Although psychology has come a long way from those early attempts at studying perception, the field has yet to pinpoint what is perception and how it should be studied.

On the one hand, many experimentalists still study behavior. They measure thresholds, reaction time, and other finely tuned quantifiable behaviors that depend upon perception. Although they continue the methodological approaches of behaviorism, they now use the empirical data to penetrate the behaviorist “black box.” The data are used to construct models and ascertain the processes of the inner self.

In addition, with the conceptual shift that was promoted by Hebb’s book on behavior as a function of cortical organization (Hebb, 1949), many researchers are now studying the neural and biological underpinnings of perception. They penetrate the behaviorist “black box” by examining its physical construction; from synaptic activation and modification, to molecular structures. Both types of experimentalists, behavioral- and bio-psychologists, have distinct frameworks for studying perception. Both present a seemingly conflicting view of what is the underlying core of perception, and what type of explanations and generalizations would have the best explanatory power for deciphering perception. It is our claim that both the pure behavioral experimentalist and the pure biopsychologist are indeed studying some aspects of perception, but that they both fail to pinpoint and study the real essence of perception.

We believe that the essence of the perceptual systems lies in the computations they perform. The overall behavior of the system and its nuts and bolts per se do not capture its essence. The core of the system’s operations needs to be studied using computational tools, such as neural networks. The behavioral experimentalist and the biopsychologist can have a role in revealing those computations, but only as long as they understand that overall behavior or biological details have limited explanatory powers by themselves. They can, and should, be used to constraint and guide computational investigations (for a detailed discussion of these issues see Dror & Gallogly, 1997, and Dror & Thomas, 1996).

I PURPOSES AND SUBSTANCE OF THIS VOLUME

4 Impact on the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Husserl's own writings did not take up any topics directly relevant to the social and behavioral sciences and therefore had little influence on them during his lifetime. Yet, they greatly stimulated interest in the phenomenological method in other authors, who explored its applicability and fruitfulness within the social sciences, broadening and strengthening the phenomenological movement. Whereas the investigations of A. Reinach into the a priori foundations of civil law, and of M. Scheler into the origins of cultural development, are contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences rather than to social sciences proper, the potentiality of a phenomenological approach was recognized early in the psychology of personality (especially in the psychology of the subconscious and in psychiatry), and in experimental psychology, where it opened up new vistas for social psychology and the psychology of perception (D. Katz, A. Metzger, M. Wertheimer): the development of gestalt psychology (K. Köhler, K. Koffka) and of K. Lewin's field theory are unthinkable without the impact of Husserl's phenomenology (see also MacLeod 1947). In the field of sociology, the formal sociology (or sociological formalism) of A. Vierkandt and G. Gurvitch have drawn explicitly on phenomenological ideas, and more recently, sociological systems theory, social constructionism and ethnomethodology have been clearly influenced by phenomenological thought (P. Berger, H. Garfinkel, E. Goffman, T. Luckmann, Niklas Luhmann, I. Srubar).

According to A. Schütz, ‘Husserl's signal contribution to the social sciences consists … in the wealth of his analyses pertinent to problems of the Lebenswelt and designed to be developed into a philosophical anthropology’ (Schütz 1959, p. 97). This development was brought about by Schütz himself, who met Husserl personally only in 1932, after publication of his own pioneering work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1972), but established close intellectual contacts for the six remaining years of Husserl's life. Schütz became the towering figure of phenomenological sociology, and it is due to the considerable impact of his work that Husserl's phenomenology, beyond its historical merit of exhibiting the limits of naturalistic and atomistic thinking, has gained a lasting influence on the social and behavioral sciences of today.

Impact on the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Husserl's own writings did not take up any topics directly relevant to the social and behavioral sciences and therefore had little influence on them during his lifetime. Yet, they greatly stimulated interest in the phenomenological method in other authors, who explored its applicability and fruitfulness within the social sciences, broadening and strengthening the phenomenological movement. Whereas the investigations of A. Reinach into the a priori foundations of civil law, and of M. Scheler into the origins of cultural development, are contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences rather than to social sciences proper, the potentiality of a phenomenological approach was recognized early in the psychology of personality (especially in the psychology of the subconscious and in psychiatry), and in experimental psychology, where it opened up new vistas for social psychology and the psychology of perception (D. Katz, A. Metzger, M. Wertheimer): the development of gestalt psychology (W. Köhler, K. Koffka) and of K. Lewin's field theory are unthinkable without the impact of Husserl's phenomenology (see also MacLeod, 1947). In the field of sociology, the formal sociology (or sociological formalism) of A. Vierkandt and A. Gurwitsch have drawn explicitly on phenomenological ideas, and more recently, sociological systems theory, social constructionism and ethnomethodology have been clearly influenced by phenomenological thought (P. Berger, H. Garfinkel, E. Goffman, T. Luckmann, Niklas Luhmann, I. Srubar).

According to A. Schütz, “Husserl's signal contribution to the social sciences consists … in the wealth of his analyses pertinent to problems of the Lebenswelt and designed to be developed into a philosophical anthropology” (Schütz, 1959: p. 97). This development was brought about by Schütz himself, who met Husserl personally only in 1932, after publication of his own pioneering work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1972), but established close intellectual contacts for the six remaining years of Husserl's life. Schütz became the towering figure of phenomenological sociology, and it is due to the considerable impact of his work that Husserl's phenomenology, beyond its historical merit of exhibiting the limits of naturalistic and atomistic thinking, has gained a lasting influence on the social and behavioral sciences of today.

Local and National Focus and Consumption

In contrast to the general theories mentioned above, historical studies of social sciences tend to emphasize unique contingencies that affect the development of disciplines and the institutions that support them. Such studies make no attempt to generalize from the particular cases they examine.

Historical studies of epistemic communities in the social sciences are an effective means to appreciate the contingency of the contemporary organization of the social sciences. Histories of specific institutions reveal even more contingency and variability. Michel Foucault's influential work reminds us of the complicated relationships between the social sciences and political power and social control (see, for example, Foucault, 1990). Social scientists are often called upon by others outside of the academic world for assistance, and this has shaped various epistemic communities as they respond to external pressures and incentives. The effective marketing of products, for example, draws on research in the psychology of perception. And the way social workers interact with the populations they serve is shaped by recent social scientific research. Immigrant women, for example, are treated differently as social scientists learn more about them (see Hacking, 1999, Chapters 4 and 5). Foucault suggests that because the knowledge generated by social scientists enables political states to have far-reaching control over their citizens' lives, social scientists can find themselves complicit in aiding political states in oppressing people. Clearly, this is not a problem unique to the social sciences. The workforce in the natural sciences has also been harnessed by those in power. Nuclear weapons, for example, were developed with the aid of physicists, and earlier developments in biological warfare were made possible with the assistance of chemists. Whether or not social scientists are as complicit as Foucault suggests, there is evidence that social scientists are more responsive to national needs than researchers in the natural sciences and are more inclined to publish for a national audience rather than an international audience. Like scholars in the humanities, social scientists “publish more often in their mother tongue and in journals with a more limited distribution” (Lavirière et al., 2006: p. 521). Thus, the research of social scientists is more often created for local consumption and is more often directed by local concerns than research in the natural sciences.

1.2.2 Imagery

The scientific investigation of mental imagery has a long and colorful history (see, e.g., Paivio, 1971; Yates, 1966) that ties it closely to the visual and spatial knowledge that we use in remembering environments. Much of the contemporary treatment of this topic has dealt with the format of the representations that underlie imagery—an issue with which we deal more extensively below in Section 3. Here, we focus briefly on what is known about the function of mental imagery, its relationship to perception, and the concept of active exploratory imagery (i.e., imagination).

Empirically, behavioral (Kosslyn, Ball, & Reiser, 1978; Perky, 1910; Segal & Fusella, 1970) and neuroscientific (see Guillot & Collet, 2010 for a review) evidence overwhelmingly support a very close association between the psychology of perception and the psychology of imagery. This association is so strong that most definitions of “imagery” describe it as a type of perception (see Waller, Schweitzer, Brunton, & Knudson, 2012). Most psychologists conceptualize imagery as engaging many of the processes used in perception; however, imagery is thought to instigate these processes through top-down instead of bottom-up pathways. Kosslyn's (1994) influential model of imagery and visual processing captures this idea, with imagery and perception both activating a visual buffer from either sensory systems (perception) or associative memory (imagery). Because imagery engages many of the same psychological processes as perception, the two functions are intimately related. Thus, imagery is thought to provide a similar function as perception—to render visual/spatial information suitable for higher-level cognitive processing.

Kosslyn's model of imagery, as well as the scientific literature's treatment of the phenomenon more generally, does an excellent job of organizing and explaining how a previous visual experience with objects can be drawn from memory as an image and subsequently transformed—scanned (Kosslyn et al., 1978), folded (Shepard & Feng, 1972), rotated (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), enlarged (Kosslyn, 1975), or inspected (Finke, Pinker, & Farah, 1989)—to enable performance on a task at hand. The theory is also able to capture how people in larger environments are able to imagine previously unexperienced viewing perspectives. However, considerably less research has examined the self-directed or spontaneous use of imagery as a creative exploratory phenomenon—a function that is commonly called “imagination.” In our own work (see Waller et al., 2012), we have argued that imagery may best be conceptualized as a thoroughly active and participatory process (see, e.g., Paivio, 1977) rather than a reconstructive one; however, future theory and research will need to determine the extent to which creative imagination underlies and fosters our knowledge of the physical environment.

An overview of contributing scientific disciplines

Research on product experience is situated at the intersection of several scientific (sub)disciplines. Because product experience research focuses on subjective experiences of people, all product experience research falls within the discipline of psychology. However, due to its multi-faceted nature, experience research crosses borders between several sub-disciplines of psychology that are usually distinguished, such as psychology of perception, cognitive psychology, and psychology of emotion. Acknowledging these different sub-disciplines, many questions can be asked concerning the interaction between a person and a product. How do people use their senses in experiencing products? How do people understand how to use a product? Why are people attracted to some products and not to others? On what grounds do people perceive a product as smart, solid, stupid, or splendid? Which memories, associations, and emotions does a product evoke? Why do people develop a bond with a product? These are the kinds of questions that will be addressed in this book.

Although the contents of some chapters are clearly linked to one of these sub-disciplines of psychology (e.g. Chapters 1–5Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5 to perception; Chapters 7, 8, and 12 to cognition; and Chapters 15 and 16 to emotion), other chapters build on all sub-disciplines, and cover an applied field of knowledge. Most of these applied disciplines have their tradition in the social and behavioural sciences, such as psychological aesthetics, human factors, marketing, and consumer science. Others, however, have their roots in the technical sciences, such as mechanical and material engineering, and human–computer interaction (HCI). Analogously to how all these disciplines together contribute to and define the multi-disciplinary field of industrial or product design, they also converge in this relatively new domain of research: Product experience (see Figure 2). We now discuss each of these contributing disciplines briefly, and we indicate which (often new) areas or fields of study within each discipline ‘move’ into the emerging domain of product experience.

Philosophers and psychologists have extensively studied people's responses to works of art. From the field of philosophical aesthetics, the work of John Dewey has been most influential to the domain of product experience. In his ‘Art as Experience’, Dewey (1934) analyzes people's involvement with artworks from a phenomenological perspective (see Chapters 9, 13, and 19). Ever since psychology was founded as a field of science, psychologists have had a keen interest in aesthetic experiences and evaluations of ‘objects’, such as simple patterns, faces, paintings, and landscapes (see e.g. Berlyne, 1971; Fechner, 1876). In their studies they generally looked for the principles governing people's perception and appreciation of these manifestations by applying more general theories of perception, motivation, cognition, and emotion. More recently, psychologists have discovered products as an interesting subject area to investigate these aesthetic or pleasure principles (e.g. Crozier, 1994). Most of this work fits perfectly in the domain of product experience (see Chapters 10 and 11).

The discipline of ergonomics or human factors traditionally focuses on the usability of products (in itself already an experiential goal). For a long time, the discipline limited itself to the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in product understanding, and to the physical or motor skills and processes enabling (or limiting) product use. In the current book, the perceptual systems and the way they operate in interaction with products are covered in Chapters 1–6Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6, while the cognitive abilities and skills and their effects on the interaction with products are covered in Chapters 6–8Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8; human motor abilities and skills affecting interaction are predominantly discussed in Chapter 6. One of the ways in which products can be made easy to use is by making it self-evident how a product should be operated (see Chapter 12). However, this perspective has been expanded. At the end of the twentieth century the ergonomic discipline increasingly began to focus on other subjective experiences arising from the use of products, including research on satisfaction, pleasure (e.g. Jordan and Green, 2002), and comfort and convenience (Vink, 2005, see Chapter 18).

Mechanical and material engineering have developed from having a singular focus on the technical/physical properties of artifacts and their effects on the durability, reliability, production, and (technical) performance of products, to studying, quantifying, and modeling the relationship between such properties and sensorial and other subjective responses in terms of meaning and aesthetics (e.g. Ashby and Johnson, 2002). This movement is most prominently seen in Kansei Engineering, a branch of engineering that started in Japan in the 1970s (see Chapter 20 for an extensive account of this approach).

Technology-driven research focuses on how products can be created with new technologies that may be beneficial to potential users. The majority of this research consists of studies on the application of digital or smart technologies in human–computer interaction. Designers are interested in exploring new functionalities and interaction possibilities that can be created with these new technologies (see e.g. Moggridge, 2007). Because these technologies are applied in more and more everyday products, the findings obtained in the field of human–computer interaction become increasingly relevant for the entire product spectrum. In addition, within the HCI field we also see a shift from usability research to user experience research, variously looking at experiences such as presence, fun, trust, or engagement (e.g. Blythe, Overbeeke, Monk, and Wright, 2003). Various issues of user-product interaction with respect to digital technology are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. In addition, the experience of functional interfaces (Chapter 21), intelligent products (Chapter 22), and computer games (Chapter 23) is extensively treated in Part III of this volume.

The field of marketing studies how products find their way to customers. Traditionally, the marketer can make use of the four instruments in the marketing mix to bring the product to market in a profitable way: product, price, promotion, and distribution (Kotler, 1984). Research on product experience will typically be focused on the subjective evaluation of a physical product or service. This may concern a first encounter with the product in a store (Chapters 25 and 27), or a repeated encounter during product usage (Chapters 16 and 17). Also in the field of consumer research, research attention has shifted from information processing approaches with a focus on utilitarian value and price, to the emotional experiences associated with product consumption (e.g. Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982).

In summary, the field of product experience research encompasses research from each of these disciplines. However, to fully understand human product experience, we need to use approaches that allow us to build bridges between these various fields of expertise. In our final ‘reflections’ we will further elaborate this view on the future of the research domain. People's experiences with products are by definition subjective; probably no two experiences are alike. Individual differences in terms of, for instance, gender, age, expertise, and (cultural) background may account for the variety in people's experiences, and some of these differences are discussed in this book. Finally, this book is not only about understanding product experience: We want to understand this phenomenon in order to contribute to ‘design for experience’. Hence, many authors address the design implications of their theories and findings, and they provide directions or guidelines to increase the likelihood that a particular designed interaction will lead to the intended experience.

Given that there are many scientific areas relevant for the study of product experiences, it is no surprise that the authors who contributed to this book differ considerably with respect to their scientific background and expertise. To preserve the coherence in the book, we have stimulated all authors to link their views and research to other related areas, to combine theoretical overviews with empirical studies, to provide concise descriptions of the methods they used, and to describe how their results may be used in design practice. It has proven to be a hard task for many authors to leave the field of expertise in which they feel comfortable, to explore largely unknown, but nonetheless fascinating, neighboring areas. This additional effort has made this book a unique collection of chapters that try to build bridges, for example, from neurophysiology and traditional psychophysics to product semantics, from universal aesthetic principles to design applications, and from human physical capabilities to product and consumption emotions. With this collection of chapters we hope to lay down the basics for the field of product experience research.