Memories

The phrase "in light of our past experiences" captures the reality that your own memories form the essential basis of your history. Perception is a complicated phenomenon. Using your sensory resources, you can encode both internal and external stimuli. What that means is, your understanding of any situation is impacted by the type, quantity, and complexity of your encountered experience. If you have your eyes closed, the amount of visual detail you can see will be restricted. I prefer to avoid saying positively or negatively impacted, since all experience is always influenced by the characteristics identified through sensory sources (seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, tasting).