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Bottom Up Processing

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Recommended: Imagination's role in the individual

The human mind primarily functions by interpreting outside stimulus into comprehensible information. Such a simple fact is very relevant to Psychology and raises the question of just how much our mind influences our senses and whether it can outright lie to us inadvertently. We are all familiar with images which change or shift upon closer inspection such as the notorious rabbit/duck image or the necker cube. These images challenge the reliability of our senses, through this essay I intend to examine whether what we perceive is a direct result of our sensory organs or if we are influenced by bias and prior experience. I will examine contradicting theories on the subject such as Gregories ‘Top-Down Processing’ versus Gibsons ‘Bottom up processing’ …show more content…

Gregory’s now famous ‘Hollow Mask’ experiment is a prime example of an experiment supposedly providing evidence for top-down processing. This experiment showed that when presented with the concave of a face mask a person perceives a normal convex face. The flaw of this experiment is that the mask has to be positioned very carefully and factors such as lighting could potentially have an effect. That is to say this illusion only truly exists under man made conditions. However Gregory takes this as proof that unlikely objects tend to be mistaken for likely objects (Gordon, 2004). A similar task is the ‘Necker Cube’ a cube which can be perceived to be two different orientations depending on where is focused upon, this faces the same limitations as the previous task i.e. an unnatural object with little real world …show more content…

His theories surrounding the ‘blind’ chimpanzees in particular show us just how much we must learn to use our eyes and no amount of alteration from our brain can supplement an inability to perceive correctly. Gibson dismissed much of Gregory’s work on the basis that it manipulated the fallibility of our eyes in relation to light rays and did not prove any influence from the brain. Even this aside the question remains of bias which is shown in Bartlett’s naval officer experiment wherein participants saw what they wanted to see and had their perception influenced by prior

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