Let's imagine you are at a party. There's music, people, and food. You know the drill, right? That's because you have a schema - a mental framework that helps you understand and interpret information. It's like a blueprint of knowledge that guides us in our interactions with the world.

Think of this as being a detective. You gather all the clues (data) first, without any preconceived notions. Your perception is purely based on the reality presented to you. Like enjoying a new type of food at the party without knowing what ingredients it has.

This time, you're more like a fortune teller. Your prior knowledge (schemas) acts as a lens for processing information. It's like guessing the ingredients of a dish at the party because you've tasted something similar before.

A fantastic example of top-down processing is the Rat Man experiment by Bugelski and Alampay (1961). Participants were shown ambiguous images after viewing a series of drawings of either animals or faces. Depending on what they saw first, they were more likely to interpret the ambiguous picture as a rat or a man wearing glasses. Their previous experience influenced their interpretation!