Recently while I hurried to cleaning up the kitchen before leaving for work I moved to pick up a covered cup that I believed was full of coffee to move it out of my way, much to my surprise it was actually an identical cup that was empty. Since I believed the that cup was full I grasped and lifted it with the amount of force that would have been required to lift a full cup, however, since the cup was empty I instead lifted the cup with too much force and tossed it into the air instead. While I was quite grateful that the cup was actually empty and I did not make a huge mess this made me think of the interaction between perception and action.
This incidence is an example of perception which our text defines as a conscious experience that is the result of the stimulation of the senses. (Goldstien, 2011) I first perceived the cup sitting on the counter and then recognized it as my coffee cup. This perception would have come from the information I would have gained from the energy carried through my environment. The receptors in my eyes detected the amount of light coming from the cup, counter and surrounding objects which would have been changed into action potentials and carried to the occipital lobe of my brain. This process allowed me to perceive the cup sitting on my counter and is an example of bottom-up processing.
After recognizing the cup I had to take an action to lift it from the counter; this shows how perception and action have to interact. The movement required me to identify the cup from the other objects on the counter, such as my lunch bag and water bottle. After I had identified the cup I needed to recognize its location on the counter, next to the sink. I then had to reach out to the right spot, grasp the cup and lift it with the correct amount of force or what I believed to be the correct amount of force. The error in my force could be attributed to top-down processing being incorrect.
Top-down or knowledge based processing as defined by the text as the processing that involves a person’s knowledge or expectation of the environment. (Goldstien, 2011) My knowledge of context would have been the fact I was in the kitchen, I had filled a cup of coffee earlier in a cup that looked like the one I was looking at and expected it to be heavier than a cup that was empty. I also had prior knowledge of how heavy a full coffee cup should be and how I should adjust my force accordingly.
In conclusion my perception of the coffee cup sitting on the counter involved both bottom- up and top-down processing. Those processing working together let me know that there was a cup on my counter where to reach in order to grasp it and how much force I should apply in order to lift it. Unfortunately, my top-down processing was incorrect leading me to lift the cup with too much force causing me to toss it into the air.
Works Cited
Goldstien, B. E. (2011). Cognitive Psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
4 thoughts on “Coffee cup force”
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Hello Catherine,
I enjoyed your post and I believe it was a great example of perception and bottom-up verses top-down processing. You placed the other readers and myself in a location familiar to us all, the kitchen. Our own top-down processing should cause us to imagine a room with sink, frig, stove, and counters. Your examples of perception appear to be pretty dead on. Seeing the cup on the counter and using what you remember about the cup (it being full of coffee) allowed you to then assess how much force you needed in order to lift the cup. Although your perception of the cup and its contents was wrong that is not something uncommon to the rest of us. Not all the time is our perceptions correct. Sometimes more information is needed to help adjust the things in which we interpret around us.
hello Catherine,
your references to bottom up and top down processing is pretty spot on here I must say the situation could have been much worse for you. have a great evening!
Catherine,
Your blog post provided a great example of how we perceive things through bottom-up and top-down processing. Your example reminds me of a similar situation in which top-down processing often causes an inappropriate reaction to the environment. Imagine that you are walking down a flight of stairs. Bottom-up processing allows you to visually perceive the steps, so you begin to walk down them. Top-down processing may cause you to assume that the flight will have more steps than it actually has, so you stumble as you take an extra step onto the ground floor, thinking that there was another step. Since you assumed there would be another step, you applied the proper amount of forward weight and momentum to step down but only stepped forward.
Another situation I found myself considering while going through this week’s lesson was viewing the clouds. While multiple people may visually sense the exact same cloud through bottom-up processing, top-down processing may cause them to perceive the cloud very differently. One individual may perceive the cloud as looking exactly like a duck while another individual may perceive it as looking similar to a train. These are very different images, but they are perceived based on the individuals’ knowledge and past experiences with these objects. Great post.
-Daniel Kennedy
Hi Catherine!
I appreciated your story and how easily it relates back to the course material. I cannot tell you how many times I have done the exact same thing, and had the exact same perceptions that you did. I liked how you went through the steps of perception from when you first saw the coffee cup to recognition to categorizing what you knew of the environment and to the force exerted when you picked it up. I also appreciate the fact that you addressed bottom-up and top-down processing. Well done!