Context effects

A context effect is an aspect of cognitive psychology that describes the influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus. The impact of context effects is considered to be part of top-down design. The concept is supported by the theoretical approach to perception known as constructive perception. Context effects can impact our daily lives in many ways such as word recognition, learning abilities, memory, and object recognition. It can have an extensive effect on marketing and consumer decisions. For example, research has shown that the comfort level of the floor that shoppers are standing on while reviewing products can affect their assessments of product's quality, leading to higher assessments if the floor is comfortable and lower ratings if it is uncomfortable. Because of effects such as this, context effects are currently studied predominantly in marketing.

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 encountering 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. Individuals generally use both types of processing to examine stimuli. The use of both sensory data and prior knowledge to reach a conclusion is a feature of optimal probabilistic reasoning, known as Bayesian inference; cognitive scientists have shown mathematically how context effects can emerge from the Bayesian inference process. When context effects occur, individuals are using environmental cues perceived while examining the stimuli in order to help analyze it. In other words, individuals 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 individuals 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.

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