In which stage of the perception process do you assign meaning to information you have selected quizlet?

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The process of attending to a stimulus. Rather than paying attention to all the stimuli in your environment, you engage in selection, the process in which your mind and body help you choose certain stimuli to attend to. For example, you notice your classmate smiling at you without paying attention to what others in the classroom are saying or doing. You notice that your friend failed to wish you a happy birthday on Facebook, but you ignore the text message she sent you. Clearly, the information you attend to influences the perceptions you form.
Importantly, we don't necessarily make conscious decisions about which stimuli to notice and which to ignore. Rather, as research indicates, three characteristics especially make a particular stimulus more likely to be selected for attention.

First, being unusual or unexpected makes a stimulus stand out.5 For instance, you might not pay attention to people talking loudly while walking across campus, but hearing the same conversation in the library would probably spark your attention, because it would be unusual in that environment. Or perhaps you're walking back to your car after a night class and you don't take particular notice of other students walking along the same sidewalk, but you do notice an older, poorly dressed man pushing a shopping cart. His presence stands out to you because you aren't used to seeing people on campus who look like him.

Second, repetition, or how frequently you're exposed to a stimulus, makes it stand out.6 For example, you're more likely to remember radio ads you've heard repeatedly than ones you've heard only once. Similarly, you tend to notice more characteristics about the people you see frequently than about those you seldom see, such as their physical appearance and behavior patterns.

Third, the intensity of a stimulus affects how much you take notice of it. You notice strong odors more than weak ones, for instance, and bright and flashy colors more than dull and muted ones.7

Once you've noticed a particular stimulus, the next step in the perception process is to classify it. This task, called organization, helps you make sense of the information by revealing how it is similar to, and different from, other things you know about. To classify a stimulus, your mind applies a perceptual schema to it, or a mental framework for organizing information.

ccording to communication researcher Peter Andersen, we use four types of schema to classify information we notice about other people: physical constructs, role constructs, interaction constructs, and psychological constructs.8

• Physical constructs emphasize people's appearance, causing us to notice objective characteristics such as height, age, ethnicity, and body shape, as well as subjective characteristics such as physical attractiveness.

• Role constructs emphasize people's social or professional position, so we notice that a person is a teacher, an accountant, a father, a community leader, and so on.9

• Interaction constructs emphasize people's behavior, so we notice that a person is outgoing, aggressive, shy, sarcastic, or considerate.

• Psychological constructs emphasize people's thoughts and feelings, causing us to perceive that a person is angry, self-assured, insecure, envious, or worried.

After noticing and classifying a stimulus, you have to assign it an interpretation to figure out what it means for you. The process of assigning meaning to information that has been selected for attention and organized.
To address those questions, you likely will pay attention to three factors to interpret her behavior: your personal experience, your knowledge of her, and the closeness of your relationship with her. Your personal experience helps you assign meaning to behavior. If co-workers have been nice to you in the past just to get favors from you later, then you might be suspicious of this co-worker's behavior.12 Your knowledge of the person helps you interpret her actions. If you know she's friendly and nice to everyone, you might interpret her behavior differently than if you notice that she's being nice only to you.13 Finally, the closeness of your relationship influences how you interpret a person's behavior. When your best friend does you an unexpected favor, you probably interpret it as a sincere sign of friendship. In contrast, when a co-worker does you a favor, you are more likely to wonder whether he or she has an ulterior motive.14

Compared with states, which are continually changing, traits are more enduring. For example, perception relies a great deal on our senses-our abilities to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. A voice that sounds just right to a hearing-impaired person may seem too loud to others.
Another physiological trait is our biological rhythm, or the cycle of daily changes we go through in body temperature, alertness, and mood.
Everyone's biological rhythm is a little different.

principle primacy effect, first impressions are critical because they set the tone for all future interactions.

Our first impressions of someone seem to stick in our mind more.

In an early study of the primacy effect, psychologist Solomon Asch found that a person described as "intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious" was evaluated more favorably than one described as "envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent."
* Notice that most of those adjectives are negative, but when the description begins with a positive one (intelligent), the effects of the more negative ones that follow it are diminished.

the first information we learn about someone tends to have a stronger effect on how we perceive that person than information we receive later on.

the primacy effect means that first impressions are powerful, not that they are unchangeable.

in which we single out one or two obvious characteristics of a person and then attribute everything he or she does to those characteristics.

form of mental laziness. Instead of trying to understand why Fatima might push herself so hard in school, we pick something obvious about her (she's an only child) and conclude that it must have something to do with that.

the more men engage in this form of over-attribution with women in general, the more likely they are to be verbally abusive with their own wives.

The researchers noted that engaging in this form of overattribution causes men to perceive their wives as being critical even when they aren't, simply because they are women. As one result, men form defensive thoughts that provoke their verbal aggression.

easy to do with marginalized groups such as sexual minorities, homeless people, and people with disabilities.77 Because members of these groups are marginalized, some people don't have much experience interacting with them.

This lack of communication might make it easier to believe that the group a person belongs to is the primary cause of his or her behaviors. For that reason, it's important to remember that being homeless or gay might be one characteristic of a person, but it doesn't define the person completely, and it's not the cause of everything that person says or does.

In which stage of the perception process do you assign meaning to information you have selected?

What are the 4 stages of the perception process quizlet?

Is the process of assigning meaning to information that has been selected for attention and organized?

What are the 4 stages of the perception process?