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Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing


Our senses help us to interpret the occurrences going on around us, but the retina is only able to perceive one at a time. Vision is a distance sense developed to sense objects without direct contact. It tells us where and what things are. The top-down and the bottom-up analysis are complimentary and use local signals to give depth to the area of an image. Visual perception takes in information about the properties and locations of objects so that we can make sense of and interact with our surroundings. Smell and hearing also play a large role in determining where something is located, but it is our vision that plays the largest part in perception. It is the most important product of top-down and bottom up processes.
             Top-down processing is a theory written by a psychologist named Richard Gregory in 1970 that proposes that we structure our perceptions starting with a larger object, concept, or idea before working our way toward more thorough information (Sincero, 2013). He sees perception as a hypothesis. Gregory argues that about 90% of visual information is lost by the time it arrives in the brain for processing. This event leads to the creation of a perceptual hypothesis about the stimulus, based on his memory and past experience that may be related to it (Sincero, 2013). There may be numerous faults in perception due to the brain creating unseemly hypotheses. .
             For instance, you are walking home at night through a wooded area. In the clearing you see a heaping form amongst shadows while hearing creepy nighttime noises. You jump backwards ready to run as your "fight or flight" kicks in only to realize that the heaping form is not a dangerous ravening beast, but a large bush. Cognition and its relation to perception is what this fictional experience illustrates. Suppose you are driving down the street and you see a neon sign that is missing several letters, but you are still able to read it.


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