Imagine you are in the grocery store and you hear someone say your name. When we don’t think certain messages meet our needs, stimuli that would normally get our attention may be completely lost. Paying close attention to whose name is called means you can be ready to start your meeting and hopefully get your business handled. When you need to speak with a financial aid officer about your scholarships and loans, you sit in the waiting room and listen for your name to be called. This type of selective attention can help us meet instrumental needs and get things done. We tend to pay attention to information that we perceive to meet our needs or interests in some way. Aside from minimizing distractions and delivering our messages enthusiastically, the content of our communication also affects salience.
Conversely, nonverbal adaptors, or nervous movements we do to relieve anxiety like pacing or twirling our hair, can be distracting. As we will learn later in Chapter 12 “Public Speaking in Various Contexts”, altering the rate, volume, and pitch of your voice, known as vocal variety, can help keep your audience engaged, as can gestures and movement. It’s probably better to have a serious conversation with a significant other in a quiet place rather than a crowded food court. As communicators, we can use this knowledge to our benefit by minimizing distractions when we have something important to say. In short, stimuli can be attention-getting in a productive or distracting way.
PERCEPTION PROCESS 3 STAGES MOVIE
Think about the couple that won’t stop talking during the movie or the upstairs neighbor whose subwoofer shakes your ceiling at night. Having our senses stimulated isn’t always a positive thing though. Creatures ranging from fish to hummingbirds are attracted to things like silver spinners on fishing poles or red and yellow bird feeders. It is probably not surprising to learn that visually and/or aurally stimulating things become salient in our perceptual field and get our attention. But how do we filter through the mass amounts of incoming information, organize it, and make meaning from what makes it through our perceptual filters and into our social realities? We respond differently to an object or person that we perceive favorably than we do to something we find unfavorable. Although perception is a largely cognitive and psychological process, how we perceive the people and objects around us affects our communication. This process, which is shown in Figure 2.1 “The Perception Process”, includes the perception of select stimuli that pass through our perceptual filters, are organized into our existing structures and patterns, and are then interpreted based on previous experiences. Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information.
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