Discuss top-down and bottom-up processing in relation to social cognitive processes, with reference to empirical studies.

Social cognition is concerned with the mental representations and processes involved in social judgements and social behaviour. Bottom-up and top-down processing will be discussed in relation to the social cognitive processes; perception, encoding and storage, reference will be made to the role of schemas, heuristics and the effect of priming. Top-down explanations of processing rely on previous experiences and expectations, and highlight the importance of the context. In contrast, bottom-up explanations suggest social judgements and behaviours are directly influenced by sensory imput (Hogg & Vaughn, 1998). The basic foundations of top-down and bottom-up processing have been adopted by many theorists and have been empirically demonstrated in the areas of; logical reasoning, person perception, person memory, judgement tendencies and linguistic communication….(short extract)