This snapshot from the classic 1985 Nintendo entertainment system game: Super Mario Bros. which is a good example of an image involving Top-Down Visual Processing. This is a design example related to my intended and existing are of study: Visual Communication that would include strategies that can be applied to videogames, a passion of mine that I hope to pursue in one form or another.
This image alone triggers the mind (especially to those familiar with the game) that there are more than more than seven actions that can be done, creating many saccades. There are many goals to achieve and so one can find themself fixated all over. You would need to look ahead (staring to the right edge of the screen in this case) to enable future actions and there is the matter of the question blocks, with one of them containing a mushroom power up. The power up would require a "just-in-time" query because as soon as it 'leaves', it can no longer be retrieved. There is constant re-thinking involved, from wondering if you should hit all the bricks or not, or to ignore them, and so forth. This one area featured in this image is "driven by the demands of attention, which in turn are determined by the needs of the tasks" (Ware, Visual Queries, p.10). Specifically, for this design, one would need to consider the timing of jumps and when to go proceed or not, especially as backtracking cannot be done.
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