In: Psychology
The difference between sensation and perception. The difference between bottom-up and top-down processing is as important as it can get. Examples of top-down processing-related factors such as visual context, expectations effects, regularities in the environment, and the Gestalt rules of perceptual grouping. Examples of depth cues must be familiar and they could be discussed in relation to bottom-up and top-down processing. The role of top-down processing in the hollow-face illusion and the Ames room illusion is important.
Sensation occurs when sensory receptors detect sensory stimuli. Perception involves the organization, interpretation, and conscious experience of those sensations. All sensory systems have both absolute and difference thresholds, which refer to the minimum amount of stimulus energy or the minimum amount of difference in stimulus energy required to be detected about 50% of the time, respectively. Sensory adaptation, selective attention, and signal detection theory can help explain what is perceived and what is not. In addition, our perceptions are affected by a number of factors, including beliefs, values, prejudices, culture, and life experiences.
Bottom-up refers to the way it is built up from the smallest pieces of sensory information. Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to perception that is driven by cognition. Your brain applies what it knows and what it expects to perceive and fills in the blanks, so to speak.
Top-down processing refers to the use of contextual information in pattern recognition. For example, understanding difficult handwriting is easier when reading complete sentences than when reading single and isolated words. This is because the meaning of the surrounding words provide a context to aid understanding.
According to Gestalt psychology, this apparent movement happens because our minds fill in missing information. This belief that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts led to the discovery of several different phenomena that occur during perception.
Binocular cues include stereopsis, eye convergence, disparity, and yielding depth from binocular vision through exploitation of parallax. Monocular cues include size: distant objects subtend smaller visual angles than near objects, grain, size, and motion parallax.
The Ames room illusion is effective because the girl on the right appears huge in relation to her twin. ... According to Gregory (1987) the visual system interprets this ambiguous illusion through a top down processing system, where previous experience of rectangular rooms is used in the analysis of this new situation. The Hollow Face Illusion is an example of a DII that generates the perception of a normal, convex face although the stimulus is physically concave, implicating the role of top-down influences such as prior knowledge and convexity bias to elicit the illusory percept.