A constructed reality | David Slater
ABSTRACT
Perception is not an objective recording of the world but an active construction, shaped by the brain’s sensory gating, reticular activation, and predictive coding. These mechanisms filter,
prioritize, and interpret sensory input, transforming fragmented data into a coherent experience. However, because this process is individualized, shaped by cognitive biases, neurobiology, and past experiences, perception of error is also subjective. What one person detects as a critical mistake may be overlooked by another, highlighting the variability in how individuals proces discrepancies between expectation and reality.
This subjectivity has profound implications for human error and safety. Errors are not absolute but perceptual mismatches, influenced by an individual’s sensory thresholds, attentional biases, and predictive assumptions. In high-risk environments, failure to recognize the variability in error perception can lead to communication breakdowns, inconsistent risk assessments, and ineffective safety interventions. Human factors engineering must accommodate perceptual diversity, ensuring that systems are designed with redundancy, adaptability, and cognitive diversity in mind. Safety strategies must move beyond rigid protocols and instead embrace flexible, user-centered approaches that account for differences in attention, expectation, and sensory processing.
Understanding perception as a constructed reality rather than a fixed truth allows us to reframe human error—not as failure, but as a natural consequence of subjective information processing.
By designing systems that align with the way humans actually perceive, predict, and correct for mismatches, we can create safer, more resilient working environments that reduce the impact of perceptual variability and enhance collective problem-solving, decision-making, and risk
management.
