13 August Today's term from psychology is Top-Down Processing.

Top-Down processing means that all of the information that each person has accumulated from their past experience, acquired knowledge, expectations, and motivations work together to influence the way that individual perceives and understands everything in the world around them.

Here's a good example: imagine that you are driving down an unfamiliar street and you see a sign for a convenience store. The sign has several missing letters, but you are still able to read it. You know what the scign says because you use top-down processing and rely on your existing knowledge to make an educated guess about what the sign says.

One classic example of top-down processing in action is a phenomenon known as the Stroop effect. In this task, color words are printed in other colors. So, for example, the word "Red" might be printed in blue, the word "Pink" might be printed in white, and so on. Participants are asked to say the color of the word but not the actual word itself. When reaction times are measured, people are much slower at saying the correct color when the color and the word are not the same.

Thus top-down processing is a form of "fill-in-the-gaps" or "extrapolation" processing that allows a person to make sense of their environment.