Sensation and Perception 9th Edition by Bruce Goldstein

Exercise 1

Consider this situation: We saw in Chapter that top-down processing occurs when perception is affected by the observer's knowledge and expectations. Of course, this knowledge is stored in neurons and groups of neurons in the brain. In this chapter, we saw that there are neurons that have become tuned to respond to specific characteristics of the environment. We could therefore say that some knowledge of the environment is built into these neurons. Thus, if a particular perception occurs because of the firing of these tuned neurons, does this qualify as top-down processing?