Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 top-down processing 
,
perception is guided by higher-level knowledge, expe-
rience, expectations, and motivations. You were able to fi gure out the meaning of the 
sentence with the missing letters because of your prior reading experience and 
because written English contains redundancies. Not every letter of each word is 
top-down processing
Perception that 
is guided by higher-level knowledge, 
experience, expectations, and 
motivations.
Understanding this cartoon involves the separation of the fi gure 
and ground. If you’re having trouble appreciating the humor, stare 
at the woman on the right, who eventually will be transformed.
(b) 
Proximity
 
(c) 
Similarity
 
(d) 
Simplicity
 
(a) 
Closure
 
FIGURE 2 
Organizing these various bits and pieces of information into meaningful wholes 
constitutes some of the most basic processes of perception, which are summed up in the 
gestalt laws of organization.
 
Do you think any other species share this organizational 
tendency? How might we fi nd out?
Study Alert
The gestalt laws of organiza-
tion are classic principles in 
the fi eld of psychology. 
Figure 2 can help you re-
member them.
feL82795_ch04_096-137.indd Page 127 20/07/10 11:31 PM user-f463
feL82795_ch04_096-137.indd Page 127 20/07/10 11:31 PM user-f463
/Volumes/202/MH00543_r1/hin73516_disk1of1/0073373516/Access_Archive/hin73516_...
/Volumes/202/MH00543_r1/hin73516_disk1of1/0073373516/Access_Archive/hin73516_

---

128 Chapter 
4 
Sensation and Perception
necessary to decode its meaning. Moreover, your expectations played a role in your 
being able to read the sentence. You were probably expecting a statement that had 
something to do with psychology, not the lyrics to a Lady Gaga song.
Top-down processing is illustrated by the importance of context in determining 
how we perceive objects. Look, for example, at Figure 4. Most of us perceive that the 
fi rst row consists of the letters A through F , while the second contains the numbers 
10 through 14. But take a more careful look and you’ll see that the “B” and the “13” 
are identical. Clearly, our perception is affected by our expectations about the two 
sequences—even though the two stimuli are exactly the same. 
However, top-down processing cannot occur on its own. Even though top-down 
processing allows us to fi ll in the gaps in ambiguous and out-of-context stimuli, we 
would be unable to perceive the meaning of such stimuli without bottom-up process-
ing.