Perceptual Set

A perceptual set is a predisposition to perceive a stimulus in one way rather than another, based on expectation, context, prior experience, culture, or motivation. Because perception is not a passive recording of sensory input, the same ambiguous stimulus can be interpreted differently depending on what the perceiver has been primed to expect immediately beforehand or has learned to expect over a lifetime. The concept helps explain why two observers can look at the same scene, image, or event and confidently report seeing different things.