Top-down processing & how to avoid self-limiting behavior

Top-down processing is a cognitive reflex. It’s your brain’s way of using its existing knowledge to fill in gaps in understanding. Sometimes, this reflex is helpful, but it may also cause you to miss important details or growth opportunities.

Say your partner leaves you a grocery list for dinner, but they have terrible handwriting. To get the right ingredients, you’ll need a top-down process. By drawing on the fact that it’s Taco Tuesday at your house, you can use your expectations regarding the finished meal to guess at the messy words.  

Top-down processing isn’t only about tasks; it can also help you recognize your mental habits. Awareness of these habits can aid you in testing which ones serve you and which are a hindrance. By understanding when to act against top-down processing, you can avoid self-limiting behavior, enhance problem solving, and improve your human mind.

British psychologist Richard Gregory proposed the term top-down processing in 1970. This type of processing begins in the mind as a way to use what you already know to understand new information. It involves using previous experience and context clues to interpret the world. It asks you to use more than sensory information to understand complex ideas.

Top-down processing vs. bottom-up processing

Bottom-up processing, on the other hand, starts with sensory input and concludes in your mind. It’s based only on what’s happening at the moment, not your previous experiences or existing knowledge. 

Let’s say you hear an unfamiliar noise. Since you don’t know its cause, you search for clues and analyze what might have happened. This is an example of how bottom-up processing works.

Top-down and bottom-up processing operate in a continuous loop. If you figure out what caused the noise, you can use that information again if you hear the same sound.

Where top-down processing helps & where it hurts

Top-down processing is a reflex, an involuntary action you perform without conscious thought. This unconscious action is great when it helps you accelerate the arrival at an intended, correct conclusion. Conversely, its automatic application sometimes leads to poor decisions. 

Knowing when top-down vs. bottom-up processing is helpful and hurtful isn’t always obvious. Learning when to question its automatic application takes self-awareness and practice.

How top-down processing helps

Top-down processing is most useful when the reward of being correct is high, and the negative consequence for being wrong is minimal. 

Most jobs involve using a bit of cognitive processing skills. During low-stakes communications with coworkers, top-down processing can save time and increase efficiency. These benefits apply to the communication skills you use in your personal life, too. 

The faster your top-down processing, the faster you can leverage existing knowledge to do the following: 

• Write and read messages at work
• Send low-stakes emails
• Manage your inbox
• Scan images, graphs, data, and presentations
• Set up automations for low-stakes repetitive tasks
• Take advantage of generative tools such as autofill
• Text friends and family members
• Plan trips to places you’ve already visited

Let’s say a few of your messages and emails have typos because your mind automatically corrects the mistakes. Even if you are a perfectionist, top-down processing ensures the main message gets to its recipients. In this way, it’s helpful for low-stakes communications and planning. It allows for effective communication with minimal negative consequences.

But sometimes, you don’t have the luxury of slow, thoughtful deliberation. In times when you must act quickly, it’s helpful to have prior knowledge and info from a previous experience to apply. Here are some examples where top-down processing can help you be more decisive:

• During a high-stakes meeting, the boss asks your opinion about a new email campaign for a big client. You haven’t seen the project before, but you feel pressured to make a quick reply. Even though you’re not an expert, you have just enough preexisting knowledge to share your initial impressions.
• A job application for your dream role requires a timed test with a few complex tasks. Fortunately, it also asks for a lot of simple things you did in your last position. Top-down processing will help you move quickly through the familiar, easy prompts. This can save mental energy and time for the unfamiliar, difficult aspects.

Top-down and bottom-up processing interact to help you make sense of the world. Consider the following familiar example: 

• As a child, you burned your hand by grabbing a tea kettle by its base. At the time of the childhood trauma, you used bottom-up processing to recognize the pain and associate the hot tea kettle with it. Today, you can use this experience as preexisting knowledge in similar situations. Top-down processing allows you to apply what you learned and avoid another burn. 

How top-down processing can hurt

It can be difficult to undo and reprogram prior knowledge driven by top-down perception. You may be overlooking a new learning process or crucial sensory input. You might be missing opportunities to learn from your mistakes. Sometimes, the automatic actions you take using top-down processing may hurt you. 

Top-down processing can potentially cause harm when the stakes are high and stem from a bad habit. Examples of circumstances like this include:

• Writers constructing certain sentences incorrectly for years due to poor initial instruction
• Editors constantly missing typos because they aren’t moving slowly enough to see incorrect spelling
• Software developers reusing suboptimal blocks of code
• Salespeople using body language they don’t realize is off-putting to prospects
• Architects seeing an ambiguous figure and automatically filling in the wrong shape

But top-down processing isn’t just something you use in your career field. In daily life, top-down processing can change how you interpret an event. With regard to pain management, a 2023 study showed that expecting something to hurt can affect perceived pain. When brain regions associated with top-down processing were activated, participants experienced more pain. This was true even when the intensity of the sensory stimuli was the same for everyone.

Top-down processing & biases

Your habits and expectations can influence how your experiences unfold. In part, this is because top-down processing uses several types of common cognitive psychology biases. A few examples of these include:

• Actor-observer bias: attributing others’ failures to character deficiencies and your own to circumstances
• Auditory biases: a cognitive processing bias where existing knowledge causes you to expect a sound that may or may not occur
• Availability heuristic: making assumptions using incomplete perception of sensory stimuli instead of a complete picture
• Confirmation bias: a type of cognitive bias where you increase the attention you give information that confirms your prior knowledge and previous experiences
• Cultural or implicit bias: a tendency to interpret things according to your culture’s customs and values
• Halo effect: the tendency for one positive impression to positively influence your opinion in another area, such as assuming a person with stereotypically physically attractive traits also has a better personality
• Hindsight bias: a type of confirmation bias where you retroactively believe a certain outcome was more predictable
• Self-serving bias: the tendency to attribute your success to personal factors over external ones
• Visual biases: automatically filling in visual information using context clues, which causes you to perceive things that aren't there (visual illusions, ambiguous shapes, and The Stroop effect perfectly demonstrate this bias)

Watch out for different types of cognitive bias. They can narrow your mind and blind you to the full truth of important matters.

Avoiding the rut: how to keep top-down processing from hindering growth

Certain exercises can help you prevent biases and influence top-down processing so it doesn’t limit you. Two cognitive perceptual processing concepts to consider for this are self-efficacy and mindfulness. 

Self-efficacy is the proven and simple idea that belief in one’s ability can improve outcomes. It can help you challenge top-down processing and foster cognitive flexibility. Try reexamining your expectations and cultivating a positive mental attitude. You may be able to accomplish a complex task or break a habit you’ve realized is hurtful. 

Mindfulness is slowing down and being present in the moment. Evidence shows that mindfulness practices may regulate areas of the brain responsible for top-down processing, general cognitive skills, and emotion. To practice mindfulness, slowly take in nearby sensory information and environmental stimuli. Temporarily let go of your existing knowledge by allowing your expectations to disappear.

The dynamic interplay between top-down processing, self-efficacy, and mindfulness

Top-down processing is like driving a car. Self-efficacy is the gas pedal, and mindfulness is the brake. It makes sense to hit the gas when driving down an empty freeway you’ve been on hundreds of times. However, you must be ready to hit the brakes when you’re on unfamiliar roads in the middle of a storm. The best drivers know when to hit each pedal and how hard. They arrive at their destinations quickly and safely.

Turn your attention back to self-efficacy and mindfulness. Imagine how using them to approach complex tasks and ideas might work in your personal or professional life. Is there a skill you may have learned the wrong way? Would mindfulness have helped that difficult conversation with your boss? Do you go too slow because of overwhelming self-doubt? It can take time and effort to answer these questions. The good news is you don’t have to answer them alone.

Challenging your top-down processing reflex: how coaching can help

It’s not easy to master the dynamic between top-down processing, mindfulness, and self-efficacy. Life circumstances and emotional health challenges can be obstacles in your path. Whether you’re feeling stuck or trying to set and achieve goals faster, a qualified coach can help. 

Coaches provide valuable insights, extra accountability, motivation, clarity, and satisfaction. A coach can give you a different perspective. They can help you reevaluate your previous knowledge, past experience, and cognitive processes. In this way, they’ll help you identify when top-down processing helps and when it hurts.

Influence top-down processing to preserve your open mind 

Understanding when to say okay vs. nay on top-down processing can make a huge difference in crucial areas of your life. It can affect your job performance, self-awareness, and how you cope with emotions. Learning how to think more effectively, open your mind, and reduce performance errors is worth your time. 

BetterUp coaching provides guidance that can help you keep an open mind. By matching with a coach, you can get convenient, curated support that enables you to overcome your limits. Together, you can cut down the cons of top-down processing and revel in the pros.