Studies of Perception

This week I have been reading about various studies of perception for my materiality presentation.  Most notably Gibson’s Theory of Direct Perception and

Max Wertheimer‘s Gestalt Psychology.

I decided to attempt to get parents of children with sensory issues as part of autism to take part in my research again.  I decided the best way to do this would be to create a survey on Survey Monkey and then ask people on various different social media channels to distribute it and answer.  Uptake was slow at first but eventually through sharing it on Twitter with Autism Hampshire, FASS, and on autism group forums I managed to secure 49 responses.    I was quite happy with this as I think that under this number would be too low a response rate to be able to use within my research and with 49 respondents we can begin to make generalisations.  I still would have preferred to of filmed responses as I think people would have spoken more in depth about their experience; but at least using a questionnaire I was able to get enough data to take a general view of the experience of children with autism and sensory needs, when it comes to their ability to interact with various materials and the affect this has on them.