TOP DOWN PROCESSING EXAMPLE PLUS

Neighbouring locations containing items with similar features tend to When detecting an object, the rate at which you can detect it (measured via reaction time, or 'RT') is partially dependent on how fast you can identify it based on its sensory features.īottom-up knowledge is integrating recognition of the features, or the dimensions of an object, such as its color, orientation, and visibility. Top-down knowledge is knowing what a target is. In this photo she is using her iPhone with a neckloop, audio jack, and t-coils which connects her to FaceTime, VoiceOver, turn -by-turn navigation, stereo music and movies, and output from third party apps, including games, audiobooks, and educational programs. Kathi Mestayer writes for Hearing Health Magazine, Be Hear Now on, and serves on the Board of the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing. Now, I have two different kinds of mistakes to look out for. It’s not as amusing as hearing canned spinach instead of the king’s speech, but a new kind of lapse. He’s usually the one who gets things wrong. But top-down, in this case, was about as helpful as the great giraffes. Of course, bottom-up gets a kick out of this.

TOP DOWN PROCESSING EXAMPLE PLUS

Bottom-up would have given me, “did you betty the border?” And bottom-up plus top-down would probably have gotten it right. In so doing, top-down completely ignored what speech sounds were available in that noisy space (which, in fairness, were pretty garbled). Putting the pieces back together, I see that my top-down system took over as the head interpreter, elbowed bottom-up out of the way, and made the call based on what it expected the waitress to say as she approached the table – were we ready to order? Nice try. “No, I asked if you needed a little more time.”Īt that point, top-down started whirring away, figuring things out. “Didn’t you ask us that the last time you were here?” Hmm, what just happened? I sat there for awhile, puzzled.Ī few minutes later, the waitress came back to our table, and said, “Are you ready to order now?” I was sitting with two friends who were chatting away, when the waitress came up to me and asked, “Are you ready to order?” Take the other night in a noisy restaurant, when my brain handed the task to top-down, assuming that it would be in a better position to tell us what was being said. So, who makes the decision about delegating tasks to the slow road or the express lane? Our brains do, usually without consulting us, and that’s how we end up on the receiving end of ‘great giraffes’ or ‘national pelvic’ radio.īecause it has a few more milliseconds to work with, it’s natural that top-down, the more deliberative process, is correct far more often. In those cases, our brains opt for the bottom-up mode and hope for the best. No editor, no proofreader…a hip-shot.īut sometimes a fast reaction is needed, because we’re busy using up top-down capacity with things like multitasking or making a tough decision. But bottom-up’s job is to get you an interpretation really, really fast. As a result, bottom-up attempts can be comically wrong, like the mis-heard lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, “he is trampling out the vintage where the great giraffes are stored.” A thoughtful, deliberative system, like top-down, would not report those lyrics, especially if you’ve heard that song a thousand times. No consideration of context or those other complicating, time-consuming factors.

The bottom-up system, on the other hand, makes a lightning-fast, best guess based on the raw sound data. It considers those factors, along with the speech sounds, and does its best to interpret what was said. Top-down auditory processing is more, shall we say, thoughtful, using tools like context (dinner table, board meeting, classroom), expectations (past experience, person speaking), and nonverbal cues (facial expressions, body language).

Let’s start with the top-down system, since it’s the one we’re more aware of. I first read about this in The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, in which he describes how we take sound input and make sense of it as speech. There are two different ways in which we make sense out of speech – “top-down” and “bottom-up.”

Top down processing example