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Apperception (Latin ad + percipere, to perceive) has the following meanings:
Example 1: We see a fire (visual perception). By apperception we correlate the appearance of fire with past experiences of being burned. Having combined present and past experience we realize this is a situation in which we should avoid placing our hand in the fire and being burned.[3]
Example 2: A rich child and a poor child walking together come across the same ten dollar bill on the sidewalk. The rich child says it is not very much money and the poor child says it is a lot of money. The difference lies in how they apperceive the same event -- the lens of past experience through which they see and value (or devalue) the money.[4]
In philosophy, Kant distinguished empirical apperception from transcendental apperception. The first is "the consciousness of the concrete actual self with its changing states", the so-called "inner sense". The second is "the pure, original, unchangeable consciousness which is the necessary condition of experience as such and the ultimate foundation of the synthetic unity of experience" (Otto F. Kraushaar in Runes[5]).