Читать книгу Going Abroad 2014 - Waldemar A. Pfoertsch - Страница 11

Every national group sees the world in a different way. Perception is a process by which each individual selects, organizes, and evaluates stimuli from the external environment to provide meaningful experiences for him or herself. Perceptual patterns are neither innate nor absolute. They are selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate. Perception is selective because there are too many stimuli in the environment for you to observe at one time. Therefore you screen out the overload and allow only selected information through your perceptual screen to your conscious mind. Perceptual patterns are learned; we are not born with a certain way to see the world, but our experience teaches us how to perceive the world.

Perception is also culturally determined because one’s cultural background influences the way of seeing the world in a certain way; and perception tends to remain constant. Once you see something in a particular way, you continue to see it that way. Your interests, values, and culture act as filters and lead you to distort, block and even create what you choose to see and hear. You perceive what you expect to perceive according to what you have been trained to see, according to your cultural map. For example, read the following sentence:

“Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.”

If asked to count the number of F’s in the sentence, most non-native speakers see all six F’s whereas many native speakers only see three of them. They do not see the F’s in the word of because it is not an important word in understanding the sentence. Usually we selectively see those words that are important according to our cultural conditioning (in this case, our linguistic conditioning).