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).
Read more about this topic: Context Effects
Famous quotes containing the words cognitive, principles, context and/or effects:
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)