What is top-down processing? (with examples)

Top-down processing is a cognitive reflex. It’s your brain’s way of using its prior knowledge to fill in gaps in understanding, influenced by your perceptual set, how we interpret sensory information, and past experiences. Sometimes this reflex is helpful, but it may also cause you to miss important details or growth opportunities.

Say your partner, who has terrible handwriting, leaves you a grocery list for dinner. You remember it’s Taco Tuesday at your house, so you use your perceptual expectations of the finished meal to guess what the list says. In this case, using top-down processing can help you choose the proper ingredients by using your existing knowledge and interpreting the information from the list. 

Top-down processing isn’t only about tasks. It can also help you recognize your mental habits and perceptual biases to determine which ones serve you and hinder you. 

While top-down thinking can streamline decision-making, it can also limit growth by reinforcing cognitive biases.

What factors influence top-down processing?

By prioritizing the right information, you can train your brain to use the different factors that influence top-down processing for good. 

These information sources help you understand how prior knowledge shapes your perception, develop stronger memory associations, and help you recall information quickly.

• Prior knowledge: Information your brain gained in the past can change how you perceive situations. For example, if you’ve been to a particular grocery store, you might already know where certain items are and can quickly find them without much thought.
• Expectations: Your brain may use anticipations or predictions, called your perceptual set, based on prior knowledge. For example, when you’re expecting a friend to arrive in a red car, you’ll likely ignore vehicles that aren’t red.
• Attentional set: These include a mental focus on stimuli such as features or objects related to a task. For example, when searching for a green apple in a fruit basket, your mind is set to look for the color green, making it easier to spot the apple.
• Task goals: Specific stimuli or objectives might direct your focus and attention, influencing your top-down process. For example, since you want to avoid pedestrians and other cars while driving, your attention is drawn to road signs and crosswalks.
• Feature weighting: Your brain may assign importance to specific stimulus or features like color, shape, or size based on what’s relevant. For example, when looking for a friend at a crowded event, you prioritize searching for their hairstyle or clothing color, ignoring other features like height.
• Instructions or cues: Another influencing factor is directions or signals that tell you where to focus. For example, a teacher tells students to look for certain vocabulary words in a reading passage. It prompts them to focus on finding those words rather than reading for overall meaning.
• Context: Interpretations of your surrounding environment can also influence top-down processing. For example, in a dark alley, you might be more alert to stimuli like sounds or movements, expecting danger. In a well-lit park, you would interpret the same sounds as less threatening.
• Memory: Your working memory keeps relevant information at the forefront of your mind. For example, when cooking a new recipe, you think carefully about the steps as you work. This helps you stay on track without checking the recipe every few minutes.
• Practice or training: Repeated exposure to a task may impact your perceptual processing as well. For example, after years of playing the piano, an experienced pianist develops a visual cortex (the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information) that enables them to sight-read music quickly. This helps the pianist know which keys to press without thinking about each note.

In contrast to top-down processing, bottom-up processing completely ignores these factors, so you focus only on what’s in front of you.

Bottom-up processing vs. top-down processing examples

Bottom-up processing starts with sensory input and concludes in your mind. Bottom-up processing is the opposite of top-down processing because it’s based only on the present and what’s happening now, not your previous experiences or existing knowledge. 

Let’s say you hear an unfamiliar noise. Since you don’t know its cause, you search for clues and analyze what might have happened. This is an example of how bottom-up processing works.

Top-down and bottom-up processing operate in a continuous loop. If you figure out what caused the noise, you learn from your experience and can use that information again if you hear the same sound. 

Top-down processing examples

These top-down processing situations involve people making decisions or acting when their minds fill in the gaps based on prior experiences. 

• Searching for a friend in a crowd: You’re meeting your friend at a concert, and your friend is wearing a red jacket. You scan the crowd, focusing on red clothing to find your friend faster.

• Finding your car in a parking lot: You remember parking near a large tree, so you narrow your search to areas with large trees instead of scanning for similar-looking cars.

• Detecting a specific sound: You recognize the tone of your phone’s notification, even amid other sounds and devices with similar ringtones.

• Spotting a familiar restaurant on a road trip: You’re searching for your favorite fast-food chain, so you focus on signage that contains the brand’s colors and logo.

• Reading indecipherable handwriting: To read your doctor’s illegibly written note, you use context clues to decipher poorly written words. Your prior knowledge of medical terms fills in the gaps.

These situations could have been approached with bottom-up processing by ignoring prior knowledge when making decisions.

Bottom-up processing examples

When you’re worried about making the wrong choice, bottom-up processing can be more helpful than top-down. 

Here’s how you’d make decisions in the same situations using bottom-up processing.

• Searching for a friend in a crowd: A red jacket captures your attention while you scan the crowd for your friend, even though you weren’t specifically looking for red clothing.

• Finding your car in a parking lot: You systematically scan each row of cars, reacting to visual cues like car shapes and colors until you find yours. 

• Detecting a specific sound: You check your phone whenever you hear a notification chime in a crowded room, even if the sound isn’t familiar to you.

• Spotting a familiar restaurant on a road trip: You check every billboard for the fast-food restaurant you want to find instead of scanning for the right colors.

• Reading indecipherable handwriting: You try to interpret each letter of your doctor’s illegible note, which makes the note very hard to read.

Both top-down and bottom-up processing are different ways of seeing the world so that you can act accordingly based on your priorities.

Top-down processing and visual perception

Visual perception is how your brain understands what you see. Research published in Teaching of Psychology describes traditional perception as a process where your brain builds a picture of the world from scratch. It pieces together what’s in front of you based on sensory information.

If the sensory information is faulty, this can cause visual illusions. In those cases, what you “see” is a visual illusion influenced more by what you expect than by actual sensory data. Since top-down processing is what you use to skip processing actual sensory data, there’s debate about whether it impacts visual perception or if it just helps you judge what you see. 

A classic example of this in action is the Stroop effect, which psychologists say reveals how our brain’s automatic processes can interfere with how we perceive the world. The Stroop effect is most often demonstrated by asking people to name the color of ink in which a word is printed, rather than reading the word itself. 

When the color and word don’t match, like the word “red” printed in blue ink, your brain experiences a conflict between the processes of reading and color recognition. This is similar to top-down processing because it highlights how our brain’s expectations can interfere with how we perceive and respond to stimulus.

That same study published in Teaching of Psychology argues that top-down processing doesn’t directly change sensory processing or observational learning. Instead, how you see the world and your personality development is influenced by a mix of internal factors that change how you process sensory information. Those internal factors include:

• Embodied perception: Our physical state changes perception. If you’re tired, carrying something heavy, or injured, your brain adjusts your perception accordingly. For example, a hill looks steeper when you’re carrying a heavy item.
• Emotional and motivational influences: Emotions like fear, sadness, or excitement change your perception. If you’re afraid of getting fired, you might read more into criticism from your boss rather than if you felt secure in your position.
• Language and memory: Language can influence colors, objects, or shapes. For example, Russian speakers have separate words for light blue and dark blue. They’re quicker to distinguish them than English speakers, who use the word “blue” for both.

What looks like top-down processing may just be changes in how we make decisions, not actual perception, which is influenced by these factors and our past experiences.

Top-down processing biases and how to avoid them

Your habits and expectations can influence how your experiences unfold. This is partly because top-down processing uses several common cognitive psychology biases. Here are a few examples and tips on how to avoid them.

• Actor-observer bias: You attribute others’ failures to character deficiencies and your own to circumstances. If someone cuts you off while you’re driving, avoid this bias by not just assuming they’re reckless. Consider they might be in an emergency and excuse them, just as you’d excuse yourself if you did the same thing.
• Auditory biases: This is a cognitive processing bias where existing knowledge causes you to expect a sound that may or may not occur. If you hear your phone vibrating when no call is coming in, avoid this bias by acknowledging that you might be imagining the sound and try to relax your focus.
• Availability heuristic: This is making assumptions using incomplete perception of sensory stimuli without having a complete picture. If you feel that flying is very dangerous after hearing about a plane crash, avoid this bias by reminding yourself that air travel is statistically much safer than driving.
• Confirmation bias: This is a cognitive bias in psychology where you increase attention to information that confirms your prior knowledge. If you’re reading an article supporting your political views, avoid this bias by challenging yourself to read opposing perspectives rather than seeking only information confirming your beliefs.
• Cultural or implicit bias: This is a tendency to interpret things according to your culture’s customs and values. If you find yourself favoring someone from your cultural background when hiring, avoid this bias by reflecting on the skills and qualifications of all candidates before making your decision.
• Halo effect: This is the tendency of one positive impression to influence your opinion in another area. If you meet someone attractive and immediately assume they are kind or intelligent, avoid this bias by consciously separating their looks from other traits.
• Hindsight bias: This is considered a confirmation bias where you retroactively believe a particular outcome is more predictable. When a project at work doesn’t succeed and you think, “I knew this would happen all along,” avoid this bias by keeping a record of your uncertainties to maintain perspective on the unpredictable process.
• Self-serving bias: This is the tendency to attribute your success to personal factors over external ones. If you succeed at your job and attribute it to your hard work but blame external factors for failures, you can avoid this bias by evaluating what went well and what didn’t.
• Visual biases: Automatically filling in visual information and using context clues so you see things that aren’t there fall into a visual bias. If you’re reading text that’s partially obscured and your brain fills in missing words, you can avoid this bias by double-checking your assumptions against the actual content. This ensures you’re not misinterpreting based on expectations.

Watch out for different types of bias by improving your cognitive skills to help deflect them. They can narrow your mind and blind you to the full truth of important matters.

Challenge your top-down processing reflex with coaching

A psychologist or a coach could provide valuable insights, accountability, motivation, clarity, and satisfaction when you’re trying to challenge your top-down processing reflex. They can provide a different perspective and help you develop metacognitive skills to deflect top-down processing.

A coach can provide guidance that can help you keep an open mind. By matching with a coach, you can get convenient, curated support that enables you to overcome your limits. 

Maximize your learning with a BetterUp Coach and challenge your top-down processing.