ET116 Culture, Cognition & Society

Perception 3: Top-down and Bottom-up theories of

Perception
Prof. Perry Hinton
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Human Perception
 1. Introduction
 2. Perceptual Organization: The Gestalt Principles
 3. Top-down and Bottom-up theories of perception
 4. Artificial perceptual systems

Top-down processing:
Theories of INDIRECT perception
 Richard Gregory (1923-2010): constructivist approach to
perception: construct a perception of reality
– The brain constructs ‘hypotheses’ about the (limited)
sensory information it receives
– Perception is a best guess based on memory and
experience: learning, context and expectation
– These assumptions may (occasionally) be wrong
– Visual illusions demonstrate this process in action

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 Top-down processing
Ambiguity:
What do we do when
an image can be
interpreted in two
different ways?

Switching attention
between two
alternate perceptions
The Necker Cube: Is the green square
at the front or back of the cube?

The Ames Room

From Hinton (2016) The Perception of People

Lots of examples of the Ames Room on YouTube

e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q45diWsVbHY
Why do we perceive people getting bigger and smaller?

Experience and Probability

 Criticism of Gregory: we are not ‘guessing’ but
learning what is probable in the context
 Experience produces expectation which produces
(statistical) probabilities of objects
– That small moving object emerging from under
the bed is (probably) the family cat
– Top-down process = experience and expectation
(culture?) guide perception

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 Bottom-up processing:
Theories of DIRECT perception
 James J. Gibson (1904-1979): The ecological approach to
perception
– Perception is not a psychological problem to be solved in the
laboratory but a feature of life – it is situated in everyday life
– We are human beings with brains and bodies that evolved over
many thousands of years
– We stand upright on two legs with two eyes at the front of our
heads, with arms and hands as parts of a moving body
– We live in a 3-D world full of useful information
– Perception is embodied action

Bottom-up processing: DIRECT perception

 The ecological approach to perception:

– We rarely ‘get it wrong’ in ordinary everyday perception
– There is more information available in ordinary perception than in the
impoverished ‘trick’ pictures in the psychological laboratory
– People are not making ‘guesses’ about the world but are engaged in
the world for a purpose, and like all other animals, perception serves a
function
– Affordance – a chair ‘affords’ sitting on
– Gibson showed that the visual scene contains lots of useful
information available to perception

Information available to people

 We move and other things move
– The flow of information before our eyes is not random but
contains flow patterns and invariant features

We can use this information to determine speed and direction

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 Invariant cues to depth and distance

Higher up is
further away

Texture and texture gradients give

cues to depth and distance Lower is
nearer

If one object obscures a second object

then the first object is closer

Perception is for doing something

 A picture of a Necker cube is not typical of ordinary life.
 Normally there are cues (information) that are affordances – they
aid perception
This image
has texture
and texture
gradients
indicating it
is a box on a
surface

Affordances are about what you can do with something:

this box affords picking up, carrying, putting something in and so on.

Perception: Top-down or bottom-up?

 Perception involves both top-down and bottom-up processing
 We still do not know the balance of top-down and bottom-up processing in
perception
 The balance may differ due to the circumstances or context
– Bright day – good lighting – mostly bottom-up?
– Night-time – poor lighting – mostly top-down?
 Top-down processing (knowledge-based) could be influenced by culture

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