If I drank it under any other circumstance, it would taste good. Has that ever happened to you?Īctually I love Gatorade. And if I took a drink of that,Įxpecting water, it would taste so shocking and gross. Sometimes I accidentally grabbed a Gatorade instead, in the dark.

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and reach for a bottle of water to drink. With a cup or bottle of water sitting near you? When I was in college I ran in the cross-country team, and I often had lots of bottles of water and bottles of Gatorade (or similar sports drink) sittingĪround. Here's an example that's happened to me before. Top-down information can have a pretty strong impact on how you understand and react to things context matters. Then, if I see something (even if I don't see it very clearly), I can probably already guess that it's a cat. Some meowing sounds, so I already strongly expect that there's a cat here. For example, I'm visiting the home of my friend who I know is a cat lover, and I heard Top-down processing is when you understand some stimulus based on the context and your expectations. It's furry, it has four legs, it has a cute face, it has whiskers, I can tell that it's a cat. bottom-up processing (1 hour)Īnother important distinction in psychology is the difference between bottom-up and top-down ways of understanding things.īottom-up processing is when you understand some stimulus (something you see, something you hear, something you taste, etc.) based on its actual properties.

Bottom up processing