Cognitive Psychology (Top-Down/ Bottom-up) Flashcards
What is perception?
the experience of sensory information after having been subjected to cognitive processing (Groome, cognitive psychology)
What is the Information-processing approach?
A bottom up, data driven approach based on the idea that systematic processing of sensory information is the key role of perception.
The Individual is the processor of information , in much the same way that a computer takes in information and follows a program to produce an output.
What is the gesalt approach?
The gestalt approach is a top-down, or knowledge driven approach based on the idea that the perception of the whole form is more than the assembly of the features.
It is based on the idea that organisation is the key role of perception. The unit of recognition is treated as a configurational whole, there is no intermediate recognition of speech sound or phonemes that constitute it.
What is parallel processing?
This is the idea that top down processes and bottom up processes interact.
What year was McGurk and Mc Donald
1976
What did McGurk and Mc Donald (1976) show/do?
In their study participants watched videos showing a speaker articulating the syllable /ba/, while the sound of /ga/ was dubbed onto the video. The most commonly reported perception was neither of the two syllables, but a fusion of both (/da/).
The McGurk effect primarily depends on bottom up processing triggered directly by discrepant visual and auditory signals.
What studies support top-down?
Warren and Warren (1970), Ganong (1980)
What studies support parallel processing?
Mattys et al (2005)
What did Warren and Warren (1970) do?
They asked people to listen to a sentence and replaced a particular phoneme in the sentence with extraneous noise (e.g in the form of a cough) participants did not notice the missing phoneme and some misidentified the phoneme.
Indicated that the brain fills in the missing phoneme automatically (top -down processing)
This is known as the phonemic restoration effect.
Explain how categorical perception is effected throughout human development
occurs over a long developmental time scale. In infancy, perceptual distinctions within what a particular language designates as a minimal pair (VOT e.g /b/ or /p/) can be made easier in later life. With experience of particular language , perceptual categorisations between minimal pairs (e.g between /p/ and /b/ become much easier, even if the sensory basis for the distinction is equivalent to comparable distinctions within a category.
THEREFORE- the early balance of bottom up and top down takes on a stronger top down influence over time.
What evidence regarding VOT is there for Bottom up processing developing before Top down processing?
Converging evidence from studies of attentional modulation of the VOT effect shows that around age 9 children lack the adult-like cognitive flexibility required to exert top-down control over stimulus-driven bottom-up processes.
What is energetic masking?
Distracting sounds cause the intelligibility of the target word to be degraded. This primarily affects bottom-up processing of words. It may occur when several people are talking at the same time, or when there are other distracting sounds in the environment
How do listeners cope with listening prolems ?
There are bottom-up processes to cope with listening problems - stemming directly from the acoustic signal. Bottom up processes are used during information masking problems. Lip reading This provides additional information and is a bottom-up process
There are also top-down processes to cope with listening problems - based on the speaker’s past knowledge and contextual information. Energetic masking requires top down processes. (phoneme restoration effect)
What did Mattys et al (2005) mean by saying that we have a hierarchical approach to segmentation? What type of processing does this show?
we have a hierarchical approach to segmentation based on three main categories of cue (lexical e.g. word knowledge), segmental (e.g. coarticulation) and metric prosody (e.g. word stress).
In optimal conditions we prefer to first use lexical cues when they are available- syntax, pragmatics, semantics and word knowledge (this is a top down process)
When there is poor lexical information e.g if lexical cues are not available- we use segmental cues - acoustic phonetic cues - coarticulation cues and allophony (this is bottom-up) and then when there is poor segmental information we resort to metric prosody cues (words stress) (this is bottom-up)
These show that we require both top-down and bottom-up to cope with a variety of listening problems!
How do Tonal languages such as Manderin contradict Matty’s hierarchical approach ?
Some languages use tone as a linguistic features - these languages would process metric prosody cues as a top-down process as they understand it as a linguistic feature . It would then be processed alongside other linguistic features such as syntax. Wang (2004) supported this phenomenon.
