Empathy allows us to internally simulate the affective and cognitive mental states of others. Neurobiological studies suggest that empathy is a complex phenomenon, which can be described using a model that includes 2 modes of processing: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up neural processing is achieved via the mirroring representation systems that play a key role in the direct sharing of the emot...

conductance by performing patch-clamp studies on fused giant synaptic vesicles. Such studies would also facilitate characterization of the mechanism through which TRPM7 may be activated in the membrane of synaptic vesicles. TRPM7 is a ‘‘chanzyme’’ consisting of fused channel and protein kinase domains (Nadler et al., 2001; Runnels et al., 2001), and while the authors showed that the channel act...

Accurately and efficiently perceiving social cues such as body movements and facial expressions is important in social interaction. Accurate social perception of this kind does not solely rely on "bottom-up" visual processing but is also subject to modulation by "top-down" signals. For example, if instructed to look for signs of happiness rather than fear, participants are more likely to catego...

Speech perception entails both top-down processing that relies primarily on language experience and bottom-up processing that depends mainly on instant auditory input. Previous models of speech perception often claim that bottom-up processing occurs in an early time window, whereas top-down processing takes place in a late time window after stimulus onset. In this paper, we evaluated the tempor...

The aim of the experiments in this paper was to explore the relationship between top-down and bottom-up processes in visual search. Employing behavioral techniques, we first consider the possible role of the magnocellular visual pathway in visual search, and find that visual search does not necessarily depend on processing by this visual sub-system. We next use functional imaging (positron emis...

Bottom-up processes can interrupt ongoing cognitive processing in order to adaptively respond to emotional stimuli of high potential significance, such as those that threaten wellbeing. However it is vital that this interference can be modulated in certain contexts to focus on current tasks. Deficits in the ability to maintain the appropriate balance between cognitive and emotional demands can ...

The speed of visual processing is central to our understanding of face perception. Yet the extent to which early visual processing influences later processing in distributed face processing networks, and the top-down modulation of such bottom-up effects, remains unclear. We used simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate cortical activity that showed unique covariation with ERP components of face pro...

People are better at remembering faces from their own race than other races-a phenomenon with significant societal implications. This Other Race Effect (ORE) in memory could arise from different attentional allocation to, and cognitive control over, same- and other-race faces during encoding. Deeper or more differentiated processing of same-race faces could yield more robust representations of ...