Affects as cognitive operations

The difficulty first is due to the naive and stubbornly maintained preconception that perception is an automatic process depending solely on the maturation of the neurosensory structures, whereby external objects are impressed as such on the mind except in cases of ‘pathology’ (‘naive realism’ – Katz 1951; Kanizsa 1980). Perception is in fact a complex construction (see Sections 3.2 and 4.5) involving learning operations; where it is found to diverge from reality, we should, before invoking intercurrent (such as affective or drive-related) causes, consider the course of the learning operations whereby the perceptual capacity was constructed.