What is an example of bottom up and top down processing?

Answer 1

Bottom up- a man feels a something crawling on his arm and, without seeing it, freaks out .

Top down- a man sees a spider and stomps on it because of his past experiences with Spiders.

Bottom up deals more with assumptions and creating a circumstance due to expectancy while Top down, on the other hand, is more of a thought out process due to knowledge. The man in the bottom up example expected that a spider would be the cause of the sensation on his arm and so reacted. The man in the top down example reacted because, based upon fact not expectancy, he knew a spider was nearby.

Answer 2

Bottom-up processing occurs when you use sensory information to form a perception, such as seeing individual letters and combining them to recognize a word. Top-down processing occurs when you use prior knowledge or expectations to interpret sensory information, like reading the word "the" quickly despite letters being jumbled.