perception psychology

• Perception

  The process of selecting, organising, and interpreting sensory information
• Sensation

  The process of receiving sensory stimuli via sensory organs and sending this information to the brain
• Perception

  Allows sensory information to enter one's conscious awareness so that it can be understood
• Top-down processing

  a type of processing that involves using prior knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory information
• Bottom-up processing

  Processing information by building larger wholes from smaller features of sensory data
• Top-down processing


  • Reading this text and seeing if you can understand what it is saying
• Top-down processing


  • Time-efficient, but can cause sensory information to be perceived inaccurately
• Bottom-up processing


  • Encountering an unfamiliar word, looking closely at it, sounding out its parts, and putting them together to form a whole
• Bottom-up processing


  • Takes longer compared to top-down processing, but perception tends to be more accurate
• Top-down processing


  Applying prior knowledge and expectations to a situation, which changes how we perceive it
• Bottom-up processing


  Relies on salient sensory data to shape our perceptions
• Top-down processing of visual information

  • Even if you can only see half an object, you can use your experience about that kind of object to fill in what you can't see
• Top-down processing of visual information

  • If you have seen a dalmatian before, your mind will be able to fill in the spaces and see a complete dalmatian dog
• Bottom-up processing of visual information

  • Seeing a crowd of people rushing towards you, looking excited and reaching out their arms or grabbing for their phones, and perceiving that they are rushing towards something worth seeing
• Top-down processing of gustatory information


  We use our experience and expectations to shape our perceptions, including our familiarity with how a food or drink usually tastes, smells, how it has reacted with our body in the past, and our expectations about how something should taste
• Bottom-up processing of gustatory information


  Uses a range of salient sensory data and our sense of smell and taste to form our gustatory perception
• Top-down processing


  A type of processing that involves using prior knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory information.
• Bottom-up processing


  A type of processing that involves using sensory information to construct a representation of the world.
• Difference between top-down and bottom-up processing


  Top-down processing starts with a high-level representation and uses it to interpret sensory information, while bottom-up processing starts with raw sensory data and uses it to build up a high-level representation. Top-down processing is more dependent on prior knowledge and expectations, while bottom-up processing is less dependent on these factors.
• Role of bottom-up processing in perception


  Bottom-up processing is helpful in situations where we don't have any prior knowledge or expectations about what we are perceiving, as it allows us to base our interpretation of the sensory information on the information itself.