Top-Down Processing and Attention

Bottom-up perceptual processing: the physical information sent to your brain, it is often noisy and incomplete (perception directs behavior)

Top-down perceptual processing: your brain’s understanding of thing, based on your personal experience, expectations, and knowledge (perception is constructed by cognition)

These two processes work together, the top-down process helps fill in the messy gaps of the bottom-up process

ATTENTION:

• a mental process

• often compared to a spotlight

- we can see what is in the spotlight and we can kind of see what is right next to it

• we only analyze and take note of what we attended

• same goes the other way, if we don’t notice something or attend to it then we wont process it

• the human mind can only attend to a single source of information at a particular split second in time

• we can move our attention from source to source extremely quickly

Here are some standard definitions for attention from various textbooks:

• The internal processes that set priorities for mental functions.

• Focusing on specific features, objects, locations, or certain thoughts or activities.

• The allocation of cognitive resources among ongoing processes.

• A concentration of mental activity to absorb important information and resist being distracted by unimportant details.

• THIS SHOWS HOW COMPLEX ATTENTION CAN BE