Perception is traditionally viewed as a bottom-up, stimulus-driven process constrained by sensory inputs. However, the study of motivation in perception highlights top-down influences, asserting that what we perceive is fundamentally shaped by who we are, what we want, and what we need at any given moment. This field gained prominence through the 'New Look' in Perception movement of the late 1940s and 1950s.
- New Look Psychology: Spearheaded by Jerome Bruner, Leo Postman, and David McClelland, this paradigm posited that perception is a decision-making process involving behavioral hypotheses, expectancies, and motivational states.
- Bruner and Goodman (1947) Experiment: Demonstrated that children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds overestimated the physical size of coins compared to wealthy children, illustrating that value and need directly distort perceptual magnitude.
- Sanford's Food Deprivation Study (1936, 1937): Showed that hungry participants hallucinated or perceived ambiguous figures as food objects more frequently than satiated participants, linking physiological drives directly to perceptual categorization.