PERSPECTIVE How Top-Down is Visual Perception? featuring new data (VSS Poster): “Attentional Cycles in Detecting Simple Events within Complex Displays”

Everyday scene perception has strong top-down influences, but we need to look for them! A perspective is developed here and example experiments introduced (poster 36.301). Big questions about human perception remain quite open, including that of how top-down perception of the everyday world is. The concepts of top-down and bottom-up processing have been fundamental to perceptual research throughout its history. Yet, the overall influence of one or the other in everyday perception is unknown, as will be explained. Top-down influences are more than a simple weight; top-down mechanisms interact with incoming data and have the potential for profound and lasting influences. For example, a top-down schema determines what types of information are most likely to be picked up and interpreted, and the information in turn influences learning and subsequent behavior (e.g., Neisser, 1976). The present work begins with the idea that observers deal with a complex world through perceptual schemata that are modified over time. Here, a schema is an attentional control process, or attentional set. A set is necessary for the most efficient levels of identification and action to be realized. The set guides attention and processing toward a goal. When a specific set is active, events consistent with it are perceived efficiently, while inconsistent events are less likely to be perceived. Changing the se