How Human Electrophysiology Informs Psychopharmacology: from Bottom-up Driven Processing to Top-Down Control

Event-Related Potentials of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing of Emotional Faces

Introduction: Emotional stimulus is processed automatically in a bottom-up way or can be processed voluntarily in a top-down way. Imaging studies have indicated that bottom-up and top-down processing are mediated through different neural systems. However, temporal differentiation of top-down versus bottom-up processing of facial emotional expressions has remained to be clarified. The present st...

Top-down control and bottom-up priming

The present study explored the mechanisms involved in the contingent capture phenomenon using a variant of the classic precueing paradigm of Folk et al. (1992). Rather than keeping the target fixed over a whole block of trials (as traditionally done with contingent capture experiments), we encouraged participants to adopt a top-down set before each trial. If top-down attentional set determines ...

Bottom-up, top-down

Distinguishing Top-Down From Bottom-Up Effects

The distinction between top-down and bottom-up effects is widely relied on in experimental psychology. However, there is an important problem with the way it is normally defined. Top-down effects are effects of previously-stored information on processing the current input. But on the face of it that includes the information that is implicit in the operation of any psychological process – in its...

Learning to Attend - From Bottom-Up to Top-Down

The control of overt visual attention relies on an interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. Purely bottom-up models may provide a reasonable account of the looking behaviors of young infants, but they cannot accurately account for attention orienting of adults in many natural behaviors. But how do humans learn to incorporate topdown mechanisms into their control of attention? The phenome...