The Study On The Effect Of Top-down Processing And Bottom-up Processing In Face Perception

Face processing can be achieved through two means: one is bottom-up processing, in whichthe brain directly processes visual information about the face received by sensory organs; and theother is top-down processing, in which people use existing knowledge or expectation of the faceto identify and explain some special visual stimuli.The two kinds of processing usually appear at the same time in perception process. Butprevious studies have just discussed face processing from one aspect, either bottom-upprocessing or top-down processing, and they have not combine two kinds of processing methodsto study face perception and to reveal the relationship between them. Therefore, the aim of thisstudy was to discuss the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing in facerecognition, on the basis of investigating the impact of top-down and bottom-up informationrespectively first.The present research included three parts. Experiment1was investigated the effect oftop-down information in face recognition. Experiment2studied the effect of bottom-upinformation. Experiment3combined the first two experimental paradigms, provided bothtop-down information and bottom-up information simultaneously, to explore the interactionbetween top-down and bottom-up processing in face recognition.The results were listed as below:（1） Top-down information could facilitate face recognition.（2） The role of top-down information in face processing had its specificity.（3） Face recognition was facilitated by bottom-up information.（4） There was interaction effect between top-down processing and bottom-up processing.（5） In face perception, the combination of top-down and bottom-up processing would besuperior to either of them.