What Is Perception Training?

Perception training is the process by which an individual works to improve some forms of perception through repetition and deliberate practice. A great deal of perception training occurs naturally during the course of childhood development, as when one learns to identify voices or recognize faces. Some people engage in deliberate training to compensate for a deficiency in perception or to improve for work or athletic purposes. Many acts of perception require the synthesis of input from multiple senses, and some degree of problem solving may be required for one to gain useful information from them. Others such as facial recognition and some trained perception skills, such as those used by athletes, usually become automatic over time and tend not to require deliberate reasoning.

People seek deliberate perception training for a variety of reasons. Some individuals have perceptual impairments that prompt them to develop ways to compensate with their other senses. A blind person, for instance, may seek to train his hearing to provide improved environmental awareness, for which vision is traditionally more important. Individuals suffering from illnesses with neurological effects, such as multiple sclerosis, might also seek some form of perception training to remain active and functional in spite of declining sensory capabilities.

Others engage in perception training for the purpose of augmenting their already-sufficient perceptual capabilities, usually for work or athletic purposes. A batter in baseball, for instance, must train himself to recognize and to respond to different types of pitches in a very short period of time. Likewise, military and law enforcement personnel may need to undergo some form of perception training that augments their awareness of their environments for the purpose of threat recognition. For both athletic and career-oriented training, one can improve perceptual skills both through formal training sessions and through practical experience. Training in a controlled environment is often very helpful, but it may be difficult to fully develop the newly-trained skills without real experience.

In some cases, perception training involves more problem solving than actual improvement of one's perceptual skills. One might need to make use of more than one sense in order to come to some conclusion about a given problem. Reaching that conclusion may require that one first recognizes that one sense, such as vision, is not sufficient to draw a good conclusion and that hearing or touch may also be necessary. One must then synthesize the information obtained from multiple senses in order to arrive at a conclusion that fits with the information obtained.