The brain has to always make endless number of perceptual decisions in every moment, which also computes the size and distance relationships, determines the boundaries and edges exist, identify figures within backgrounds, move into objects that people want and away from objects they need to avoid. Besides, many of these perceptual decisions are made without any conscious awareness of the processes involved. Therefore, the brain is automatically computing the sensory feedback and guiding the body to perform the necessary tasks. One of similar examples to illustrate distance or space is perceptual adaption, which is quite similar to one classic experiment of Helmholtz (n.d). It is described after seeing a receiver, a quarterback would automatically …show more content…
But then the scientist tries to distort his perception of the receiver by giving him the glasses, which displaces his visual field by 20 degrees. In other words, the distal stimulus or the real object will be 20 degrees off from where he perceived it to be. If he continues to throw the ball with his glasses on, he would begin to adapt to the new signals by compensating for the missed information that the retina sending to his brain, which means starting throwing what seems to him to be 20 degrees off in order to hit the receiver. Because of the new experience, he will quickly learn a new coordination, this could be called top down processing. When his brain starts making use of information that has already brought into the brain by sensory systems, which is known as conceptually-driven processing (Cherry,