Perception Starts At The Receptors: Top-Down Processing
When I think of perception, I think of someone’s personal opinion about another’s character or a situation. What we see and what we make of it based on our knowledge or experiences – from a visual sense or personal interaction. Having that understanding, “Top-Down processing,” which is the “processing that depends on a person’s prior knowledge or expectations” (Cognitive Psychology -page 57), makes sense. However, understanding the role of top-down processing to speech and how we perceive speech and how it can change or alter how one processes it and understands language, is fascinating to me.
Working in an environment where it was crucial to make sense of dialogs and gather information from conversations that vary from thirty seconds to over an hour, depended highly on how much I knew about the individuals and their background. Knowing where they were from, where they were at the time, and their personal way of dialog, made a huge difference. Having this knowledge allowed me to try to characterize an individual, find patterns and recognize changes.
But what fascinated me the most was when it was difficult to understand speech, what was being said, either due to audio quality, the environment or a person’s emotions or circumstances and how different people listen to the same, let’s say, thirty seconds of speech, yet everyone would hear something different. People who shared the same knowledge of the individuals in the conversations were close in agreement, others hear something completely off the wall, and others couldn’t really make anything out, would all of the sudden understand what was being said after someone else would say it.
From that experience, I learned first-hand how easy it was to mold your understanding of sound and speech. How experience and knowledge influenced what one hears and how you process information.
References:
Goldstein, E. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (3rd ed.). Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Hi Mercedes,
I also think that how we process speech is very interesting. A specific situation comes to mind when I think about how a few different people could be in the same room and hear the same things, but leave with different understandings. When I was in high school, we had a public speaker come to our school and speak about bullying. At the time, we were all juniors and pretty mature (at least mature in the aspect of being a teenager) and had the capability to process what the speaker was saying. We all heard the same words and were able to understand what she was saying, but we all left with a different message. Some people, typically the people who actively bullied in school, left saying that the message was ‘stupid’ and a ‘waste of time’. On the other hand, some people, typically those were actively being bullied, left saying that the speech was ‘awesome’ and ‘had a lot of merit’. This is a great example of how top-down processing works because prior knowledge and experience had shaped the way that we heard this message.