Perception continued (Week 3)

In week three we carried on with the theme of perception. To day the class was taken by the students in which we had different type of tests to test our own perceptions. According to Schiffman and Kanuk, 2003 perception is "how we see the world around us".the perception tests we under took consisted of a ….Coca cola test, Chocolate test and an advert backing track test.
The first test was the coca cola challenge this consisted of having three types of coca cola they were…
Coca cola
Coke zero
Diet coke

The aim of the challenge was to see weather people could really differentiate between the three main cokes and weather or not they really chose that specific coke because of its taste or weather it was to do with other outside factors. The results of the perception experiment was that people could easily distinguish the real coca cola but they found it harder to differentiate between the diet coke and the coke zero. This showed that people tend to go for the products by the way it is advertised and how the product is perceived to be among there friendship groups. If we was to do the experiment we would ask them to choose what one they would but just by looking at the labels and then ask them what one they would purchase due to the taste and see if they match up.
Another perception test which we did was the chocolate test in which we tasted the chocolate and saw weather the price of the chocolate determines the better tasting one. The out come of this test showed that generally cheaper the chocolate the worse tasting it was so that price did have an impact on the taste of the chocolate. We also did a test on auditory perception on which we had one advert shown with two different backing tracks, we then had to say how the backing track changed the adverts perceived target audience and the power that our sense of sound has when knowing who to target your product to.
The last thing we researched was Gestalt psychology this is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts.

here is a clip of samusng using optical illusions to advertise there new phone.

There are 4 main parts to Gestalt theory they are….
Grouping-is when we tend to associate a product with the surrounding products and we assume that they share the same characteristics.
Figure and ground-is where there is an image that catches you attention and the background is normally left plain so it doest distract from the image. Such as the Dove soap advert

However there is also time in which there are both distinguishable images both in the foreground and the background, this is good for catching the persons eye however they may miss the message being advertised .These are called optical illusions some examples are http://www.optillusions.com
Closure - We tend to see an incomplete picture as complete picture such as the elephant we see it as we think it should appear and it is not until we actually look at it we realise it is wrong. So how many legs does the elephant have?















Stimulus ambiguity - the stimulus is ambiguous if it does not automatically resemble a recognisable form. We need to find a context in order to interpret it. For example it is when a picture can be either or for example do you see the muscian or the girls face? http://www.optillusions.com/dp/1-9.htm