An essential premise of cognitive psychology is that people selectively process the information available to them in their world. Attention is limited and tends to be guided by goals, expectancies, or prior knowledge. Because we categorize situations and events according to features abstracted and generalized from experience, we may overlook or misinterpret information when a familiar pattern can be easily read into a situation. Although processing is selective, it has a coherence that derives from the distinctive organization of knowledge and feeling that characterizes each person. Thus, experiencing is inevitably an expression of a perspective or point of view. Perspective is an ill-defined concept, but Novak's characterization of standpoint provides a working definition of the term:

In effect perspective is the integrated operation of both stable and transient factors that shape a person's state of mind moment by moment. Research on memory and on social cognition has amply demonstrated that events can be experienced in qualitatively different ways.