Cognitive Principles of Context Effects
Context effects employ top-down design when analyzing information. Top down design fuels understanding of an image by using prior experiences and knowledge to interpret a stimulus. This process helps us analyze familiar scenes and objects when we encounter them. During perception of any kind people generally use either sensory data (bottom-up design) or prior knowledge of the stimulus (top-down design) when analyzing the stimulus. We generally use both types of processing to examine stimuli. When context effects occur we are using environmental cues perceived while examining the stimuli in order to help analyze it. In other words, we often make relative decisions that are influenced by the environment or previous exposure to objects.
These decisions may be greatly influenced by these external forces and alter the way we view an object. For example, research has shown that people rank television commercials as either good or bad in relation to their enjoyment levels of the show during which the commercials are presented. The more they like or dislike the show the more likely they are to rate the commercials shown during the show more positively or negatively (respectively). Another example shows during sound recognition a context effect can use other sounds in the environment to change the way we categorize a sound.
Context effects can come in several forms, including configural superiority effect which demonstrates varying degrees of spatial recognition depending on if stimuli are present in an organized configuration or present in isolation. For example, one may recognize a fully composed object faster than its individual parts (object-superiority effect).
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