Chapter three in our textbook discusses two types of processing that work together in order for us to perceive the world around us.  The first is called bottom up processing, and deals with the stimulation of the receptors of the brain.  When we see an image light is reflected sending signals to the visual receiving area of the cortex (Goldstein, 2011, p.50).  The second type of processing is what interested me more, top down processing, Goldstein defined top down processing as “processing that begins with a person’s prior knowledge or expectations (p. 52) . Top down processing allows us to perceive things more than just what we see, our prior knowledge and experience can cause us to have a different perception.

While I was reading this section in our book I found myself thinking of how I could see this in children as they grow and learn about the world, mainly how my daughter’s perceptions differ from my own.  My daughter is 19 months old, she has much less life experience than an adult, so I believe her use of top down processing would be much more broad than that of an adults.  Where I would see a truck and perceive that not only is it a truck, it is an 18 wheeler, perhaps based on the color or logo I may be able to tell what company it belongs to, and what it is likely to be hauling.  My daughter sees a truck and says something like “car, vroom vroom”. Because she has less experience, and possibly no prior knowledge of trucks she believes a vehicle on the road with wheels must be a car.

Another example of this is when she was learning about animals, although she now can name most animals she sees, there was a time when she called everything a cat.  We have a pet cat, and cat was actually her first word, and shortly after this she began calling every animal a cat.  Our pet cat was the first and only animal she saw for a long time, she had no knowledge of other animals, to her the only animal was a cat, and every animal was a cat. Her prior knowledge and experiences had her perceive every animal she saw as a cat.

Although I noticed her doing this before taking this class, I did not really ever think of it in this way, I thought it was more of a lack of language.  I believed she simply did not know certain words so she would use the few words she knew instead, I did not realize that she was actually perceiving things differently than I was.  Now knowing about the two different types of processing I can say that her top down processing likely caused this, her lack of knowledge and experience in certain situations caused her to perceive things differently.

References

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