Perception combines bottom-up and top-down processing

Perception starts from the senses (bottom-up), but the final result of what we perceive combines what we receive from our senses and our memory, such as knowledge and experiences (top-down).

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References

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p.57).

The sequence of events from eye to brain is called bottom-up processing, because it starts at the "bottom" or beginning of the system. [...] Perception also involves factors such as a person's knowledge of the environment, the expectations people bring to the perceptual situation, and their attention to specific stimuli.

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 58).

Figure 3.10 Perception is always a combination of both top-down and bottom-up processing. Bottom-up refers to what comes from the environment and top-down refers to what the individual brings.

Backlinks

• Multiple approaches to perception
  • All of these approaches have a common thread: Our top-down past experiences determines our perception (Perception combines bottom-up and top-down processing).
• Perception of pain can be affected by expectation
  • It's easy to think that pain is all bottom-up processing (Perception combines bottom-up and top-down processing), but there are evidence that the perception of pain can be altered by what we expect and what we pay attention to.
• Listening to foreign language requires top-down processing
  • Perception combines bottom-up and top-down processing. It is easy to understand that that things we perceive are coming from our senses, but harder to understand what top-down processing means without an example.