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Perception occurs when you do the following:

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Each step in the perception process influences the others: the information you select determines how you organize it, your mental organization of information shapes how you interpret it, and your interpretation of information influences how you mentally organize it. (See Figure 2.2.) Let’s take a closer look at each step.

Step 1: Select Information. During the first step of perception, selection, you focus your attention on certain sights, sounds, tastes, touches, or smells in your environment. One estimate suggests that even though your senses take in 11 million bits of information per second, you select only about 40 bits to pay attention to (Wilson, 2002). With so much information out there, how do you decide what to select? You’re more likely to focus on something when it is visually or audibly stimulating, deviates from your expectations, or is viewed as important (Fiske & Taylor, 1991).

Consider what this means for your communication. If you’re attending a presentation and the speaker talks in a dramatic, impassioned way, you’re more likely to pay attention than if the presenter had spoken in a monotone and stood passively behind the lectern. If Tom, a team member who’s usually talkative, sits silently during a meeting, he’ll defy your expectations—so you’ll notice him. And if you hear your child start to cry in an adjacent room, you’ll likely consider the situation important and focus your attention on it.

Step 2: Organize the Information into a Pattern. Once you’ve selected something to focus your attention on, you structure the information you receive through your senses into a coherent pattern in your mind. This is the second step of the perception process, known as organization (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). For example, once your attention is drawn to Tom (the unusually quiet group member), you begin to observe all that he is doing—his posture, facial expressions, bodily movements, and lack of comments—and organize it within your mind as a coherent package: “This is how Tom is acting right now.”

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Step 3: Interpret the Pattern. As you organize the information you’ve selected into a coherent pattern, you engage in the third step of perception: interpretation, or assigning meaning to the information you’ve selected. You call to mind familiar information that’s relevant, and use that information to make sense of what you’re hearing and seeing. Borrowing on the previous example, this is the stage of perception in which you would assign meaning to the behaviors of Tom that you have focused your attention on: “When people who are usually talkative are suddenly quiet, they often have something on their minds. Tom is being unusually quiet. Maybe Tom is upset about something.”