Sensation & Perception
Sensation and perception describe two linked processes fundamental to sensing and perceiving the world around us. Sensation allows our brains to detect physical energy from the environment via our five senses before converting this information, or stimuli, into neural signals. These sensations are then selected, organized and interpreted through the process of perception.
Perception: Top-down Processing
Perception can be divided into two types of processing: top-down processing and bottom-up processing. Top-down processing begins with one’s prior knowledge and expectations while bottom-up processing begins with sensory information that is integrated by the brain. Unlike bottom-down processing, top-down processing displays higher-level cognition by enabling us to draw on context clues and pattern recognition to help us interpret sensory information and generate a response. In class, we learned about top-down processing upon discovering that we could read and understand a text’s jumbled-up words as long as each word’s first and last letters remained in tact.
My Experience
I experienced top-down processing while I was driving home from a friend’s house one night this summer. Before this night, I had only driven home from this location once during the bright daytime. Not to mention, my phone was low on battery this particular night so I could not use GPS for navigation.
When it was time to drive home that August night, I recalled that I would have to take some backroads before getting onto the highway. With this in mind, I navigated the backroads by using my prior knowledge of what the roads and their distinctive landmarks looked like. Therefore, I was able to successfully remember the curvature of the roads and the appearance of the surrounding neighborhood’s houses and greenery.
Once I finally reached the highway, I drove along for awhile until I needed to find my exit to get off at. Unsure of the right one to take, I was forced to rely on the unlit road signs. The darkness made it increasingly difficult to see where I was going so I had to strain my eyes to read a road sign near a familiar-looking turn. Thankfully, I was able to make out some of the letters on the sign and piece together that the words spelled out my hometown. After deciphering the words on this sign and taking the turn, I stayed on one straight path until I arrived home.
Connection to Top-down Processing
This experience of mine connects to top-down processing because it began with my thoughts and flowed down to my senses. My prior knowledge regarding the appearance of the backroads near my friend’s house successfully allowed me to navigate and reach the highway. Then while driving on the highway, I was able to visually interpret the dark road sign and use my hands to turn the steering wheel of the car in the right direction. This demonstrated that the use of top-down processing enabled me to not only grasp and comprehend the unlit words of the road sign based on the few letters that I could discern, but also translate this information to my senses. Overall, my understanding as a result of top-down processing involved interpreting context clues and recognizing familiar patterns in language.
Image Citation:
“Study.com.” Study.com, https://study.com/academy/lesson/top-down-processing-examples-definition-quiz.html.