Examples Of Bottom-Up Perception

Considering how humans perceive the world in bottom-up and top-down interpretations is very interesting and enlightening. My understanding this far is that typically a person who is experiencing something new for the first-time will process stimulus as a bottom-up perception because they have no previous expectation or experience with the new stimulus. People will process stimulus as top-down when they are familiar with the stimulus and have an existing understanding or relation to the stimulus.

Examples of bottom-up perception are trying new foods, getting a new job, going to a new place, meeting new people, etc. A person will depend and heighten their senses to gather as much information as possible in each instance to try to make a determination

I can get into my car and I do not have to depend on my senses to tell me how to start my vehicle and put it in gear to drive. Everything is similar to what I would expect from all the times I have gotten into and driven my vehicle. Top-down would certainly be what people call, “auto-pilot”. This is when people have completed a task yet do not remember actually doing the steps to complete the task.

There must be shifts where perception is interchanging. I will not put much thought into getting into my vehicle, putting on my seatbelt and starting my car, because I have done this hundreds of times, however, if an alert light were to flash to tell me something was wrong, I believe it would shift me from top-down to bottom-up perception and interpretation. I would pay close attention to all of my senses to provide me the information to help me make the determination of what is going on and what I have to

I feel there must be a combination of both top-down and bottom-up perception. In order to understand when something is alive, we have our top-down perception that is built on experience that provides us with the information that tells us when something is alive. We must also have the experiences that provide the information that tells us when something is no longer alive. Before I lost my mother, the distinction of living and nonliving didn’t seem so complicated. My mother collapsed and had to be put on life support. Top-down processing in the characteristics of the living, I could see her chest lift to breath, hear the inhales and exhales of her breath, and hear her heart beat through the beeping of the monitor. I understood her body to be alive, but she was only artificially alive. It was determined that my mother was brain dead. I was being told that what experience taught me was life, no longer applied in this situation. From that moment, I could no longer trust my experience. I had to focus on what the world was telling me. Despite understanding the medical team’s assessment, I knew what life was and understood that my mother exhibited characteristics of life. When the machine was shut down and she took only a couple of breaths, I became hysterical. All of my senses were giving me information that I could not