Top-down vs. Bottom-up processing and relation to gestalt principles?

[Kemosabe]

I am a bit confused about how the definitions of top-down and bottom-up processing can be used be applied to gestalt principles:
From what I understand:
Bottom-up processing refers to when we start from looking at the stimulus and that influences our perception of the surrounding world.

Top-down processing refers to using background knowledge to influence our perception of a stimulus and shape our cognitive understanding.

So would the gestalt principles of similarity, pragnanz, continuity, and closure all be examples of top-down processing or bottom up processing?

I'm thinking similarity would be a bottom-up because similar items (stimuli) are grouped together.
I'm thinking pragnanz would be a top-down because it is used to reduce an image into its similar forms.
I'm thinking proximity would be bottom-up because it involves similar objects (stimuli) being grouped together
I'm thinking continuity would be top-down i'm not sure why.
and I'm thinking closure would be bottom-up because similar objects are grouped together as a whole. Though I've seen closure described as top-down somewhere.

Which ones are top-down and which ones are bottom up processes and why? I'm really confused and I wouldn't be surprised if they were all top-down, but why?

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[Labrat07]

I want to know this as well. Please and thank you.

 

[shefv]

Gestalt principles are related top down processing. They state that we rely on our concepts, theories, experience and prior knowledge to make sense of the stimulus (think about when we mentally fill in the gaps of a partial shape for it to make sense to us). Whereas bottom up is like learning something for the first time - where you don't have prior knowledge or experience with something and you look at each individual part for its own merit and try to string it together in a way that would make sense.

Continuity - we fill in gaps of a shape based on prior experience for it to resemble something we have seen before
Proximity - since we have experience that things that are close to each other are part of one unit, we use that to influence our perception and we begin to think that if multiple objects/features are close to each other, they are part of a single unit
Closure and Similarity - same as proximity (we are using prior knowledge and experience to make this judgement)
Pragnanz - for us to simplify something complex into simple terms, we must have had a prior knowledge or experience with it

You can refer to this paper:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627307003765

 

[RRRM]

I beg to disagree. As the students argue, gestalt is not necessarily evidence in favor of top-down processing. Please check the evidence obtained with visual agnosia pacients in the following document. It shows how gestalt principles are still functional whilst perceiving; their only difficulty is with recognizing, identifying or interpreting to properly perceived visual objects.

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~ashas/Cognition Textbook/chapter2.pdf

 

[jk1]

You guys should check out http://pragnanzfacts.com/index.php/gestalt-theory-psychology-law-pragnanz/ to get a better understanding; it helped me out!