Modified: 2020-03-18
Motivation affects perception. If I gave you a perceptual problem to solve you might keep at it for a short time. But, if at the end of that time you still had not solved the problem you might give up. But, if I offered you 20 bonus points toward your final grade, you would probably keep at it for a little longer.
All of us bring a wealth of expectations to any perceptual situation. We expect that fly balls in a baseball game will eventually come down. We expect that a sentence will have a subject, a verb, and an object. We know what we are trying to write, so proof reading our own material is difficult. We may perceive things that fulfill those expectations and not what they actually are.