Top-Down Processing: Simply Psychology (2023)

These structures, also known as schemata, are built from past experiences, prior knowledge, emotions, and expectations (Piaget, 1953).

Why do we use top-down processing?

British psychologist Richard Gregory (1970) proposed that the perceptual process is constructive and relies on top-down processing to interpret new information.

He argued that the use of sensory information alone is an insufficient form of perceptual processing, since most of the information (over 90%) is lost between the time new stimuli reach the eye and reach the brain, which requires the use of contextual information from prior knowledge. and experiences to adequately perceive the information.

Gregory's Theory states that we use our existing knowledge and the memory of past experiences to form specific hypotheses about the meanings of new information.

Rather than expend vast amounts of energy to perceive each sensation individually, Gregory's theory argues that we combine the use of our senses to interpret new incoming stimuli with prior knowledge and past experience to find meaning.

Influences on top-down processing

According to Gregory (1970), different factors can influence top-down processing, such as expectations, emotion, motivation, and culture. This is known asperceptual set theory.

Top-Down Processing Examples

You can understand how top-down processing works by considering examples of this phenomenon in action.

typographical errors

The human mind does not read each letter individually, but words collectively. As long as the first and last letters of the word are in the same place, we can identify the correct word despite the typo.

Goldstein (2018) argues that our ability to understand typos and misspellings is another example of top-down processing because we are actively applying our prior experiences, knowledge, and expectations to correctly identify misspelled words.

stroop effect

The Stroop effect, named after the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop (1935), conveys how interference affects reaction time.

For example, imagine that you are given a list of colors, but the word and the color of the words presented in the list do not match. After studying the list of colors, you are asked to name the color of the words on the list, but not the color of the word itself.

While it seems like an easy task at first, Stroop found that participants could easily identify the color of the word presented if it matched its semantic meaning.

When the color did not match the semantic meaning of the word, the participants had to pay more attention to the task at hand.

visual illusions

Necker's cube is a visual illusion of an ambiguous figure created by Louis Albert Necker (1832). The cube maintains perceptual ambiguity through its wireframe design that allows the viewer to interpret the cube as having two different front squares: a top right square or bottom left square.

Due to their equal plausibility, the brain cannot decide which hypothesis is true and can continually switch between the cube's visual orientations.

This is an example of top-down processing because the sensory input has not changed since the viewer first saw the cube. What changed was the perception of the cube, concluding that the perception of information flows from the top down, not from the bottom up.

auditory illusions

Phonemic restoration is an auditory illusion that occurs when we hear parts of words that don't actually exist. The term for this phenomenon was coined by Richard Warren (1970), where he sought to explain how background noise seemingly covering specific phonemes within a verbal conversation, humanity is still capable of understanding individual phonemes.

In a nutshell, Warren sought to discover how people can understand verbal communication despite noise covering parts of the words being communicated.

Imagine that you are asked to listen to a sentence and then write down word for word what you heard. However, during the sentence the speaker coughs at the beginning of one of the words, eliminating some phonemes.

The phonemic restoration illusion holds that, despite the speaker's cough, the listener could write down the missing phonemes.

For example, Warren discovered that when he presented the sentence "The wheel was found to be on the axle." and replaced the wh- phonemes with cough, each participant continued to write the word wheel, despite the lack of wh- phonemes.

This is an example of top-down processing, as participants use prior knowledge, experience, and expectations to correctly identify the word despite missing phonemes.

Bayesian approach

It is now clear that human perception does not work in isolation. You cannot rely on your senses or prior knowledge and experience alone to accurately interpret new stimuli.

Instead, Kersten et al. (2004) argue that human perception is a combination of using our senses as well as prior knowledge and experience to interpret new stimuli.

The combination of top-down and bottom-up processing is called a Bayesian approach. The Bayesian Theory affirms that interpreting the ambiguity of the external world requires an optimal decision strategy that allows us the most viable state of the world. This approach argues that this perceptual decision is a careful balance between the reliability of current sensory stimuli and the probability of past stimuli.

We can see the Bayesian Approach in action when we create scenes and objects that are within our field of view. According to the Bayesian approach, our environment is made up of probable structures, and scene properties such as object shape, light, and illumination are nothing more than mere statistical regularities (Kersten et al., 2004).

It is this statistical regularity that allows the brain to perceive more than just current sensory information, but also past information to create scenes and objects within our visual field.

For example, when our brain tries to distinguish shapes from shading patterns, it is our prior knowledge that corrects for this ambiguity in structure.

Simply put, the Bayesian approach asserts that we can take ambiguous hatch patterns and interpret them as shapes because we've seen a shape similar to the one in front of us before.

Our visual systems use the statistical regularities of an object's shape, light, and illumination to interpret possible conclusions from new information (Kersten et al., 2004). We combine probabilities from past experiences with current sensory stimuli to make sense of what we are perceiving.

APA style references

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Necker, L. (1832). LXI.Observations on some remarkable optical phenomena seen in Switzerland; and in an optical phenomenon that occurs when seeing the figure of a crystal or geometric solid.The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1(5), 329-337.

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