Apperception is how your mind puts new information in context. You get a perception of a chair through your eyes, but apperception is how your mind relates it to chairs you've seen before.
- Pronunciation: /,æpɚ'sɛpʃən/
- English Description: cognitive processes involved in obtaining and storing knowledge
- Chinese Translation: 类化(lei4 hua4)
- Spanish Translation: percepción
- STORY: We have many perceptions: information we take in through our senses, like "It's cloudy today." An apperception goes one step further by considering the perception in relation to things you’ve perceived in the past. "There's Julia" is a perception, but "Julia is my friend" is an apperception, because it's based on past experience. "My stomach hurts" is a perception, but "I might throw up" is an apperception. Apperception is a sophisticated mental process that keeps developing through our lives.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- This feeling has been called by philosophers the apperception or consciousness of our own existence.
- For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com