apperception

n.

1. Conscious perception with full awareness.
2. The process of understanding by which newly observed qualities of an object are related to past experience.

[New Latin apperceptiō, apperceptiōn- : Latin ad-, ad- + Latin perceptiō, perception; see perception.]

apperceptive ap'per·cep'tive (-sĕp'tĭv) adj.

Term introduced by Leibniz for the mind's reflective apprehension of its own inner states. Kant distinguishes empirical apperception, which is consciousness of the ordinary, changing self, and transcendental apperception. This is the unchangeable consciousness that unifies experience as that of one subject, and is thereby the ultimate foundation of the very possibility of experience and thought.

The perception of a situation in terms of past experience, rather than in terms of the stimuli, which are immediately present. In sport, apperceiving may result, for example, in a team player misreading a situation and making inappropriate anticipatory movements.

When experimental psychology became a fact towards the end of the 19th century, the only concepts available to it were those developed in either a philosophical or a biological context. 'Apperception' belongs to the former category, having played an important role in the German philosophical tradition since the beginning of the 18th century. Wilhelm Wundt, who initiated the first systematic research programme in experimental psychology and trained many of its early practitioners, was steeped in this tradition and actively contributed to it. As a result, the concept of apperception occupied a prominent place in the early literature of experimental psychology.

The term was originally used by G. W. Leibniz, particularly in his critique of Lockian sensationalism, as a way of emphasizing the distinction between a passive sensation and a mental content self-consciously 'apperceived'. It became the major technical term used by German philosophers to express what they considered to be the two fundamental features of the human mind: the fact that mental experience is not composed of separate bits but forms a unity, and the fact that this unity involves a constructive activity of the mind itself rather than a passive reflection of external events.

This usage is found in the highly influential philosophy of Immanuel Kant, where a clear distinction is introduced between the empirically observed unity of experience and a transcendental apperception, a cognitive act, which makes this unity possible. This distinction devalued the introspective analysis of inner experience as being concerned only with effects and appearances, but it also acted as a challenge for 19th-century psychologists to find a more satisfactory explanation for the empirical unity of experience.

The challenge was taken up by Kant's successor, J. F. Herbart, whose model of mental functioning involved the notion of ideas combining to form powerful 'masses' that dominated the mental life of the individual. Apperception occurred through the assimilation of new ideas by an existing complex of ideas. Herbart's concepts achieved wide popularity among 19th-century educationists, so that the concept of apperception began to descend from the lofty heights of philosophical speculation.

This process was continued in the work of Wundt, who proposed to subject the process of apperception to experimental investigation in the psychological laboratory. The original vehicle for accomplishing this was provided by reaction-time experiments which had been developed by physiologists. Wundt conceived the idea of using variations in reaction times that occur with different patterns of stimulus presentation as an empirical index of central apperceptive processes. Responses to sequences of stimuli or to distracting stimuli, for example, had to involve the kind of synthesizing cognitive activity that was traditionally referred to as apperception. These early experiments constituted the first systematic attempt to subject central psychological processes to precise laboratory investigation.

The notion that the process of apperception occupied measurable periods of time implied that it was not transcendental but involved physiological processes of definite physical duration. Wundt speculated that these processes were localized in an 'apperception centre' in the forebrain that coordinated the activity of lower sensory and motor centres.

This was the physical side of Wundt's psychophysical theory of apperception. The more prominent psychological side treated the phenomenon of attention as the primary subjectively observable expression of the apperceptive process. While this provided further opportunities for experimental study, Wundt also used the theory of apperception to explain the structure of language, developing an early version of psycholinguistics (see neurolinguistics, Luria on).

Thus, apperception became the major unifying concept in the first important theoretical system of modern psychology, attempting to synthesize evidence from psychophysiology, from laboratory studies of human cognition, and from comparative studies of symbolic structures. It is noteworthy that, while the effects of apperception were generally investigated in the context of cognition, Wundt believed that its psychological sources lay in affective processes.

This theoretical tour de force proved to be premature. Wundt's successors, including his most prominent students, abandoned the concept of apperception, restricting themselves to observables, like attention. This generation of psychologists was anxious to cut psychology's ties with philosophy, which Wundt had wanted to maintain. Apperception was rejected as excessively metaphysical. Possible practical applications of their findings became more interesting to many empirical psychologists than were broad theoretical syntheses, and from this point of view apperception was a redundant concept. For many years work on central integrative processes was neglected in favour of a more simplistic sensorimotor psychology. Some of the phenomena that apperception had been intended to explain were more effectively reinterpreted in the framework of Gestalt psychology. Thus the term went out of use rather quickly and permanently. Contemporary cognitive science has revived an interest in many of the problems that the theory of apperception had been concerned with, but the term itself has not been resurrected.

(Published 1987)

— Kurt Danziger

Bibliography
• Leahy, T. H. (1980). A History of Psychology, ch. 7.
• Rieber, R. W. (ed.) (1980). Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, chs. 2–4.
• Wundt, W. (1911). An Introduction to Psychology, ch. 4. Repr. 1973.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - apperception, bevidst opfattelse

Nederlands (Dutch)
bewuste/ geconcentreerde waarneming, vereniging van eerdere voorstellingen met nieuwe

Français (French)
n. - (Psych) aperception

Deutsch (German)
n. - bewußtes Auffassen, Wahrnehmung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ενόραση, διαίσθηση, αντίληψη, προσλαμβάνουσα

Italiano (Italian)
appercezione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - apercepção (f) (Psicol.), percepção (f) clara

Русский (Russian)
апперцепция, самосознание

Español (Spanish)
n. - apercepción

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - klar uppfattning, full förståelse

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
类化, 统觉, 明觉

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 類化, 統覺, 明覺

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 통각, 유화

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 統覚, 類化

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) وعي الذات, الإدراك بالترابط‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הבנה, הבנה מחוויה קודמת, תפיסה‬

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