Apperception (from lat. ad — to + perceptio — perception) — attentive, meaningful, conscious, thoughtful perception. Pay attention and understand what you see. At the same time, different people, depending on their ability to comprehend and past experience, will see different things. They have different apperception.
Another definition of apperception is mental processes that ensure the dependence of the perception of objects and phenomena on the past experience of a given subject, on the content and direction (goals and motives) of his current activity, on personal characteristics (feelings, attitudes, etc.).
The term was introduced into science by G. Leibniz. He was the first to separate perception and apperception, understanding the first stage of the primitive, vague, unconscious presentation of some content (“many in one”), and apperception as the stage of clear and distinct, conscious (in modern terms, categorized, meaningful) perception.
Apperception, according to Leibniz, includes memory and attention and is a necessary condition for higher cognition and self-consciousness. Subsequently, the concept of apperception developed mainly in German philosophy and psychology (I. Kant, I. Herbart, W. Wundt, etc.), where, with all the differences in understanding, it was considered as an immanently and spontaneously developing ability of the soul and the source of a single stream of consciousness . Kant, without limiting apperception, like Leibniz, to the highest level of cognition, believed that it determines the combination of ideas, and distinguished between empirical and transcendental apperception. Herbart introduced the concept of apperception into pedagogy, interpreting it as the awareness of new material perceived by the subjects under the influence of a stock of ideas — previous knowledge and experience, which he called the apperceptive mass. Wundt, who turned apperception into a universal explanatory principle, believed that apperception is the beginning of the entire mental life of a person, «a special mental causality, an internal mental force» that determines the behavior of a person.
Representatives of Gestalt psychology reduced apperception to the structural integrity of perception, depending on the primary structures that arise and change according to their internal laws.
Apperception is the dependence of perception on the content of a person’s mental life, on the characteristics of his personality, and on the past experience of the subject. Perception is an active process in which received information is used to generate and test hypotheses. The nature of these hypotheses is determined by the content of past experience. When an object is perceived, traces of past perceptions are also activated. Therefore, the same object can be perceived and reproduced differently by different people. The richer the experience of a person, the richer his perception, the more he sees in the subject. The content of perception is determined both by the task set before a person and by the motives of his activity. An essential factor influencing the content of perception is the attitude of the subject, which is formed under the influence of immediately preceding perceptions and represents a kind of readiness to perceive the newly presented object in a certain way. This phenomenon, studied by D. Uznadze and his collaborators, characterizes the dependence of perception on the state of the perceiving subject, which in turn is determined by previous influences on him. The influence of the setup is broad, extending to the operation of various analyzers. In the process of perception, emotions are also involved, which can change the content of perception; with an emotional attitude to an object, it easily becomes an object of perception.