COGNITIVE DISTORTION AND EGO‐INVOLVEMENT 1

Since the advent of what might be called dynamic perception as demonstrated by the expenments of Bruner and Postman and their associates (1, 2, 7, 8), there appears to be some confusion as to what IS perceptual process and what is cognitive process If we think of cognition in the generic sense as all of knowing or understandmg or interpreting, that is, as a higher mental process which begins with perceptual data (12), then it is confusing to include (as some experimenters have done) the involved consequences of perception withm the perceptual process itself This inclusion is a philosq)hical heritage—^Descartes and Leibnitz among others defined perception as encompassing cognitive responses Unwittingly perhaps, modem psychologists who speak of "perceiving the world" when they really mean knowing the world, foster the philosopher's definitions and the confusion. Recently the Bruner-Postman group has made partial attempts to delineate the shape of perceptual process as distinct from cognitive process McGinmes (5) distinguishes between perception and "reaction" occurring in that sequence Postman, Bruner, and Walk (9) have separated accumulated knowledge from perception with the phrase "cognitive support " It can be shown that the perception-cognition dichotomy is primarily an heunstic one, but it is nonetheless of some sigmfican<«. Bruner and Postman (2), Murphy (6), and Krech and Crutchfield (4) have expressed the opinion that principles of perception (cf 3) apply to cognition as well. If this univalence were already a demonstrable fact, there would be httle value in distinguishing between cognition and perception, although the distinction could, of course, still be made on the heuristic level Since, however, the generality