Choose one of your five senses (touch, taste, smell, vision, hearing), describe how your biology, mood, prior learning, recent/past experiences, or upbringing might influence your perceptions of the world around you. What are some potential applications of these findings to your chosen field of study? To how you interact and communicate with others around you?

To help get you started, here is a sample of what you need to do for this Discussion:

For the sense of sight, your biology can definitely impact on how you see the world around you. For example, if you inherit poor vision and it develops at a young age, or you are color blind due to a genetic anomaly, this will impact on what you see and how you pay attention to the multitude of stimuli in the world around you. You might not see things as clearly as others, and this may allow you to see the bigger picture and not get bogged down in details. Sometimes, your mood can also impact what you see and focus on. For example, if you are in a bad mood or you do not feel well, you might not notice things that you normally would like the sunshine, a smiling child’s face, or a beautiful flower. Instead, you focus on the litter which is scattered about in the street or the dog poop your neighbor failed to pick up.

Prior learning will influence how you respond to certain stimuli in the world around you as well – for example, slowing down when the traffic light turns yellow. Your recent experience can also impact on how to see the world around you by encouraging you to focus more on some things and not others. For example, if you watch the evening news, you will begin to believe that the world around you is a very unsafe and frightening place to live. As a result, this recent experience or “priming” may encourage you to focus more on the negative side of life, and this can influence how you “see” the world around you. Your childhood or upbringing may also influence how you see things by encouraging you to focus on some things and not others. In other words, you learn to “see” by observing your parents and what they pay attention to.

I am going to focus my studies on marketing and advertising, and I think that this subject is a very important topic for my future work in the business world. How to get the attention of the consumer is critical to the success of an advertisement, so I have to think about all of these different factors when I work on designing a graphic art piece for a newspaper advertisement.