Writing Resources
What is perception According to the English Oxford Living Dictionary the word perception means The ability to see hear or become aware of something through the senses In psychology perception is the organization identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or the environment Some might think that individuals do not have much control over their perception and that the environment determines what individuals perceive and attend to Accordingly it is commonly thought that perception is bottom up Nevertheless it has been proved that this is not the only way that perception is processed Although the environment does influence human perception relevant stimuli usually capture attention more powerfully Hence perception is also top down Psychologists are often divided on whether perceptions are constructed through bottom up or top down processing with many stating that both occur simultaneously and even that it would not be possible for one to exist without the other Accordingly one could simply say that these two coexist However the purpose of this essay is to discuss which one is prevalent This controversy was specially discussed by the American psychologist James Jerome Gibson 1966 who proposed the bottom up theory for perception and the British psychologist Richard Langton Gregory 1970 who proposed the top down theory Gregory and the Top Down Processing
