1 Psychology and human development1.1 Sensation and perception
1.1.2 Active and passive perception
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
New in the 2027 syllabus
The College added this topic for exams from January 2027.
Sampling the world
Active perception uses movement and attention to gather information. Examples are turning the head to find where a sound comes from, or running the fingers over an object.
Passive perception means stimulation arrives without the person choosing the movement that samples it. Sensory processing can still happen.
Sensorimotor contingencies are the links between an action and the change in sensation it causes. They let the brain predict what will happen when you move.
The evidence
Held and Hein's kitten experiment compared two conditions. Some kittens produced their own movement. Others were carried passively, so they received similar visual stimulation without moving themselves. The active kittens developed better visually guided behaviour.
Interpret this carefully. The finding is about coordinating vision with action. It does not prove that the passive kittens had no visual sensation.
A common confusion
Active versus passive describes how information is acquired. Bottom-up versus top-down describes how information is processed. The two distinctions are not interchangeable.