The oldest and most complete theory of perception, now known as structuralism, held that simple elementary experiences, or sensations, recur in various combinations to compose the world we perceive sensations presumably result from the excitation of individual sensory cells, or receptor neurons, each contributing a characteristic signal, called a specific nerve energy, to the central nervous system.
Similarly, the fact that a sensory end organ, or receptor, has been found that is electrically responsive to a particular wave length remains of unknown import until its effects on experience (or on suitably selected discriminatory behaviors, which is an equivalent statement for most purposes) are demonstrated.
More important, the touchstone of perceptual research is perceptual experience: the fact that the prism bends light energy of different wave lengths by different amounts is, of course, a physical discovery the fact that white-appearing light thus spreads out into the myriad colors of the spectrum is a matter of perception. Research in perception requires the most sophisticated controls of the motivational, judgmental, and learning processes, i.e., the use of the techniques of experimental psychology. Despite these different interests, perceptual study remains predominantly psychological. Such understanding is obviously important to the physician, to the physiologist, and, it was once thought, to the philosopher concerned with the question of how we can be sure about the truth of our ideas. These findings are in line with our theoretical argument that environmental migrants who suffer from environmentally induced grievances are ultimately more likely to perceive conflict and challenges in their new locations.The study of perception is the attempt to understand those aspects of observations of the world of things and people that depend on the nature of the observer. The results emphasize that migrants who experienced gradual, long-term environmental events in their former homes are more likely to perceive conflict in their new location than those having experienced sudden, short-term environmental events. We develop this argument before quantitatively analyzing newly collected micro-level data on intra-state migration from five developing countries.
We contend that variation in migrants' conflict perception can be explained by the type of environmental event people experienced in their former home, whether gradual, and long-term or sudden-onset, short-term environmental changes. In particular, we focus on environmental migrants' conflict perceptions. We take this shortcoming as a motivation for our research and study the relationship between environmental migration and conflict at the micro level. However, our understanding of the factors behind and consequences of migration is surprisingly limited. Migration is likely to be a key factor linking climate change and conflict.