We have all been there…everyone is excited about the vacation that’s been planned for weeks. You’re either driving or a passenger in a vehicle, cruising down the highway (of course while obeying all speed limits!), the music is turned up and you are singing along to your favorite song, the windows are down and ahead of you there’s multiple small glowing red orbs. Your brain immediately begins to process the scene. What are the lights? How much further ahead of you are they? Why are they glowing? A traffic jam is the most obvious reason for all the glowing red dots of lights. In order to react to what is happening ahead of you, your brain first must determine what exactly is going on. Your brain goes through multiple processes without you even realizing it is going on. I will use this example to illustrate the bottom-up and top-down processes.
The initial determination will be made by using the bottom-up processing approach. At this time your brain is taking in the information in the most basic form first. The tail lights of the vehicles are shining and the geons used to make up the cars are easily recognizable to tell you that there are cars ahead of you on the highway. Geons are defined as being simple shapes that can be combined to create a larger, more recognizable object (Goldstein, 51). This is just where the process begins for your brain to determine what actions must be taken before you even recognize you are thinking about it.
Top-down processing now takes into account your previous experiences to determine what is happening in your environment. Most everyone has seen tail lights on a vehicle light up and know that it means someone in the vehicle is pressing on the brake pedal slowing the vehicle. The law of good continuation, one of the Gestalt Laws of Organization, defines this perception clearly for us: “…objects that are overlapped by other objects are perceived as continuing behind the overlapping object” (59). Basically, by knowing that glowing tail lights mean a car is slowing, and seeing multiple tail lights, we perceive the vehicles as being on the highway even if we do not see the entire vehicle.
Finally, your brain will take in the surrounding information to determine the size of the object you are approaching. How far apart are the reflectors in the lanes? How far apart are the tail lights? Are there buildings or trees you can compare the size to? Your brain takes into account the distances, sizes, and intensity of the vehicles to determine how soon you should also slow down your vehicle.
This is a very simplified explanation of such vast, complex ideas. Your brain begins with bottom-up by using light receptors to determine the objects you are seeing. Then the top-down processes begin to occur with determining what exactly is going on before you by using past experiences. Finally, your brain will have your body react by calculating how much pressure should be applied to your brake pedal. All of this is happening before you even become conscious to what you are doing.
Kandee Parker-McKinnell
References
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting MInd, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd. Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
This was a very nice and informative post. I can relate to this scenario because as I was driving home from work tonight I found myself in a traffic jam. My initial response was why are we slowing down. Then I saw there were lines of cars, sirens and so many blinking lights that it was almost disorienting. Once my brain began making connections I understood there was a fire, or an accident in one of the homes along the road ahead.
In my blog entry I also wrote of geods and how our brain first perceives small basic shapes, or parts of a larger object and next pieces them together to form the scenes and landscapes around us. These scenes include fire trucks, ambulances, and cars waiting to reach their destination. This step-by-step system is named bottom up processing and is how every human is able sees the world around them. This has also been referred to as “data-driven processing” because what we perceive begins with a single stimuli, and from there information reaches the retina of our eye, and eventually the visual cortex(Mcleod,2007). Along each stop more information is pieced together until the final picture or landscape is seen. When we consider the idea of “top down processing” we should consider our attention, and how without the visual cortex we would not be able to focus on or perceive information.
As busy individuals it is easy to get caught up in life, and not take time to stop and contemplate how our brain functions. We don’t usually converse about how our body moves, or how neurons work together to send impulses throughout our body.
Mcleod,saul.(2007).VisualPerception.SimplyPsychologyTheory.retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/perception-theories.html