A basic tenet of humanistic psychology is that “here and now” perception is different from and superior to “there and then” perception. This article describes an experimental test of this tenet. The test is based on the close relationship between categorizing and perceiving of stimuli. Data showed that people tend to use fewer categories to sort stimuli when in a “there and then” perspective than in a “here and now” perspective. This outcome is consistent with a theorem of information theory regarding signal to noise ratio and optimal number of categories.
