so this video is going to look at Gregory's constructivist theory of perception now the first thing that Gregory says about perception is that it's constructed so if you think about it when we see smoke on a dark night we probably know it's from a fire and not a ghost so Gregory believed that we construct the world that we see in our minds using our best guesses and in Psychology we refer to that as an inference so instead of using the word guesses you would use the word inferences in an exam answer and we use all the information available to us to make that best guess now when we think about inferences inference is a process that involves taking all the information that's in front of you and then drawing a conclusion about what it means using your past experiences so for example if you see someone smiling you infer or you guess that they're pleased because Smiles usually mean that someone's going to be pleased to see you now our brains use our experiences all those past experiences we've had to infer or interpret the situation the best way we know how to so again it's like making a bit of a guess someone smiles and we have to make a guess that that's what they mean now our brains also use all the sensory information in the environment to draw a conclusion about what our eyes are seeing so to build off that last point we're going to have a quick look at visual cues now visual cues help our brain make these inferences or guesses about what's going on and there's loads of different visual cues in the environment some of them include things such as depth distance or the size and shapes of objects there are a few visual cues that we can use to help make guesses about what's going on so for the most of the time perception is pretty accurate because our brain can use what's in the environment to try and work out what's there but it's not always accurate for example when we see a visual illusion now Gregory calls this a mistaken hypothesis now this is when our brain draws the wrong conclusion from what's in front of it so it's got all this information in front of it our brain can't always Ways work out what's going on cuz all it's doing really is making a guess about what's actually there now unlike Gibson's Theory Gregory's Theory focuses on past experiences and the role of nurture so Gregory says that we learn how to perceive things through experience of interacting with the world around us so we build up all these Banks of different experiences through our lives and that helps us to perceive things so as we grow up our perception becomes more sophisticated it becomes more detailed we become better at guessing and perceiving things so perception is learned through experience rather than being born with it so this whole Theory really contradicts or goes against Gibson's Theory which we learned in the previous lesson