Perception

Perception is an element of cognition that discerns signals into knowledge or its absence.

For example: to perceive a dog can mean seeing it when light as the signal reflects on the dog and hits our eyes, but it can also mean to hear the dog bark and have the sound as the signal hit our ears. In any case, we must also have previous knowledge of the likeness of a dog or how the barking of a dog sounds.

Perception therefore is not merely to sense, but to discern and group signals into forms, then possibly match forms to previous knowledge and in this way to an entity, such as the thing itself in the case of direct experience or, for example, to discern a given sound as being a word that we know the meaning of.