Colloquially, I would indeed use them in a similar way. (I can have a positive or negative perception of a person, and call my judgment on the totality of information I have on something my "perception" of that thing - and I might replace "perception" with "attitude" and basically communicate the same thing.)

In the context of academic psychology, I would use "perception" in a much more narrow and distinct way - namely, as the result of the processing of sensory input, and as something that happens early during information processing.

Attitudes, on the other hand, always involve some sort evaluative judgment on a person, object or situation - albeit this does not have to neccessarily be something I can explicitly report. This also suggests that attitudes occur later and are built "on top of" perception.

But I agree that your mileage can vary greatly by field and even authors. If definitions aren't provided, that leaves working your backward from the authors' use of the terms, which may very not allow for a distinction between the two.

While I believe that Julia Englert 's answer is fully correct, I would make a decisive plea for observing the differences between the concepts of perception and attitude in scientific writings.

The word "perception" is properly used either for the process of identifying objective properties of an entity through the senses or for the result of that process (This does not mean that there are no misperceptions or perceptual illusions). The word "attitude" on the other hand means a subjective stance towards existing things that are either currently perceived or known by the person who has the attitude.

An utterance like "I perceive this person's behaviour as antisocial" always generates the impression that the speaker conveys a fact, even though it is nothing but an opinion. I therefore strongly advocate for avoiding the misleading interchange of "perception" and "attitude", and for consistently correcting people who fail to distinguish between the respective concepts.