Bottom-Up Approach – As a result of current sensory input, bottom-up processing builds perceptions based on external sensory data. There is no prior knowledge required, and perceptions are solely determined by what one is experiencing at moment.
Bottom-up processing In Action
The bottom-up approach begins by using minute sensory details to construct broader ideas or perceptions of the environment. In the visual cortex, information is processed in one direction from the retina. The visual pathway carries out increasingly complex analyses of input with each successive stage.
Light patterns are among the first sensory inputs we analyze. Upon playing this information to the retina, it initiates the transfer of information into electrical impulses which enter the brain and activate further responses along the visual pathways until they reach the visual cortex.
Bottom-up processing says that as a result of this process of sensation, the brain perceives new stimuli without the help of our schemas. Psychologist James J. Gibson argued that new stimuli can be perceived without prior knowledge.
Perception, according to Gibson, is a situation in which what one sees is what one gets. His theory argued that the brain perceives new stimuli by analyzing them directly, we experience new stimuli in a straight line and experience their meaning. According to the theory, the incoming stimuli are properly perceived via the environment because it contains all of the necessary tools. You can also follow this link for better knowledge billing address meaning.
Examples
To gain a better understanding of the working of bottom-up processing, let’s compare it with top-down processing by considering these examples.
1. Toe Stubbing
Suppose you stubbed your toe on the corner of a table. The pain receptors will promptly recognize the pain sensation and send the pain signals directly to the brain, where they are processed.
Because the brain receives pain signals from the sensory receptors, this would be the case of bottom-up processing.
Having experienced the horrifying pain of stubbing, one becomes extra cautious about avoiding table corners to avoid having it happen again, which is an example of top-down processing.
As soon as the toe is stubbed, the pain receptors recognize the pain sensation, detect the pain and send signals to the brain. This occurs through bottom-up processing.
2. Blind Food Tasting
This challenge is aimed at isolating all but one sense, taste, in a blind taste testing challenge. The blindfolded participants are expected to recognize the various characteristics of the food and/drink before them.
As part of a study, participants were blindfolded and asked to taste a variety of wines, to understand if branding had any effect on consumer choice and purchase.
During this study, participants were not allowed to be influenced by any other sense other than taste.
As a result, bottom-up processing was employed, since the participants turned solely to their sense of taste to select which wines were suitable for their tastes without being provided with any other information about the wine.
If they were asked to name the brand of wine, this would have required the use of their memory, i.e. bottom-up as well as top-down processing would have occurred.
The study only employed bottom-up processing since participants were only asked to choose wines that best met their choices.
3. Prosopagnosia
A person with prosopagnosia has trouble recognizing faces. This is also known as face blindness. Those who are affected cannot tell whether they have seen someone’s face before.
When analyzing someone’s face, individuals depend upon their ability to comprehend what they are seeing at the moment, as top-down processing will not be able to distinguish one face from another.
Persons with prosopagnosia can recognize different facial characteristics but are unable to assign names to faces since they can’t recall their memory. Their inability to combine individual facial features into complete faces that they can recognize in the future prevents them from recognizing familiar faces.
Individuals with this condition are unable to store mental images of the faces of people they know, so creating perceptions based on top-down processing is inherently impossible since they don’t remember the faces of people they know.
As individuals with prosopagnosia are constantly confronted with new sensory information, it is quite challenging for them to put a name with a face in each encounter.
To Conclude, the bottom-up approach says that our perceptions are formed as a result of incoming stimuli and work upwards to the point at which we form a mental image of the object.
