The Mind's Mechanisms for Perceiving the World and the Human Errors that Arise from Them

My specialty is psychology. I am particularly interested in the mechanisms by which people perceive the world and the human errors that result from them.   

Due to the nature of our sensory organs and the limits of our behavioral range, the information we can obtain about the world is very narrow and limited. In response, we are equipped with mechanisms to supplement this missing information and perceive the world. For example, while the world is a three-dimensional space consisting of height, width, and depth, the world reflected in our eyes is a two-dimensional image that lacks depth. We can compensate for this missing dimension and perceive the world as a three-dimensional space. However, it is not uncommon for the shape and size of objects perceived and brought to consciousness by adding a dimension in this way to be distorted from the original two-dimensional image. This is considered one of the causes of various optical illusions.   

Examples of the mind's function of supplementing missing information leading to a misperception of the world are not limited to optical illusions. For example, we have a strong tendency to simply assume that things we see frequently are more numerous. As a test, try to rank convenience stores, dental clinics, and beauty salons in Japan in order of their quantity. When I ask this question in class, most students put convenience stores first, but statistics show that beauty salons are overwhelmingly the most numerous, followed by dental clinics, with convenience stores being the least common. Everyone is very surprised when I tell them this, but it is only natural that they cannot answer correctly, as almost no one has statistical information on the number of stores in the first place. What is more interesting is that, for some reason, everyone is reasonably confident in their perception of the number of stores (which is why they are surprised to find they are wrong). This shows how we form strong, and sometimes mistaken, beliefs about "what the world is generally like" from limited information. In this day and age, where easy access to diverse information forces us to be selective, I believe it is increasingly important to understand the mechanisms by which we perceive the world and the errors that can occur.