When I was in elementary I would complain to my other that I couldn’t see the board at school and was the reason that my test scores were so low that year. My best friend had just gotten glasses so she assumed that it was just me trying to be like my peers and at first, ignored my protests. It wasn’t until we went to see the play “Grease” at a local theater that she started to believe me. We were sitting fairly close to the stage but I still couldn’t see much of what was going on. I had slipped through the cracks for the standard eye tests that my doctor and school has completed for me, so I have been able to sharpen my perception skills.

Top-down processing is how I have learned to navigate through the world not only during my elementary school days but also as my vision has decreased throughout my adult years. Top-down processing is when a person uses their prior knowledge or expectations to be able to recognize objects based on just a few geons. Top-down processing also contains the theory “multiple personalities of a blob” (Olivia & Torralba, 2007) which is in regards to what we expect to see in different contexts influences our interpretations of the picture (Goldstein, 2011). When read this portion of top-down processing I automatically resonated with it when I saw the 4 blurry pictures. Often, throughout my life if I misplaced my glasses, had to remove my glasses, or felt like I could to without some optical assistance that day, this is how I view my surroundings. My world is a blurry picture and I often use this multiple personalities of a blob method to make sense of the things around me.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my desk at work when I was my manager carrying a box full of odd shaped items. The items looked like a stick with long snake-like strings hanging out. I could feel my mind reaching for some out there explanation like he was holding some obscure animal in that cardboard box. “These look like something from a reptile! It’s a lizard tail! Maybe it IS a snake!” my mind was shouting out in the brief second it took for me question my own thoughts. “Why would he be bringing a box of lizards into the office?” I questioned. That’s just it. There was absolutely no reason to bring anything like that into the office so it had to be something pertaining to the setting we were in. BAM! Just a quickly as the thought of the box of lizard tails entered my head it was out and I knew what the box was filled with. My manager was holding a new shipping box filled with new phones pieces and headsets for our desks. The tail like pieces were the phone cords used to connect to our phones, not an animal appendage. I used the orientation and context which I was perceiving the blob to have the pieces fit together. I was able to rule out items that were not office related and focus only on a list that would be found in that setting. I used my prior knowledge in this situation, like that we may have once spoken about getting new headsets at some point, and knowing what my current headset looks like, to come to the conclusion that I did.

In this same situation I was able to also perceive the size of the items in the box, even though the distance between us was a good bit. I took into consideration the size of the object compared to other objects around it. I knew the items within the box were relatively small because I could see how big the box was compared to my manager’s body. My manager who has a fairly small frame was not struggling to carry the box in her hands so I assumed that it wasn’t that heavy and it was just little bigger than the width of her shoulders. Even a few yards away I was able to know that the items in that box were more than likely pretty small so that they could fit in the box. By perceiving size and taking distance into account I could tell that the items were not truly as small as they looked from afar and that their size would actually be bigger close up. The image of my retina becomes smaller as my manager is far away but the perception is that she and the items she is holding remain to be the same size.

If we only used bottom-up processing our perception would still be off and misconstrued. Of course, all different types of processing is important to perceive the world around us but as someone whose vision is deteriorating, top-bottom processing is pretty helpful. As I sit here writing this blog my 11 year old sister asked me to explain what I was completing my homework assignment on so I had to think for a second before giving her the most basic and easy to understand explanation that I could think of in that moment. I told her, “Top-down processing is when all you see is a blur of objects, shapes, and colors, much like is you put a dab of Vaseline on your glasses. You use the information of what you know about the world to make sense of all the shapes without being able to see it clear enough”. Thankfully, our minds continue to expand our knowledge to help us perceive everything around us every day.

References:

Goldstein, E. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (3rd ed.). Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

A, O., & A, T. (2007). The Role of Context in Object Recognition. Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 520-527.