the role of orthography in difficult speech perception tasks has already been proved (dehaene & cohen, 2011). since the processing of heterographic homophones is believed to be more difficult than other words (hino & colleagues, 2013), the present study aimed at identifying the role of orthography and word forms in perception of such words during top-down processes, such as speech perception. a...

Theeuwes (2010) summarizes an impressive number of studies demonstrating interference by irrelevant visual singletons in computer experiments with humans. In these studies, if participants search for a relevant singleton target, such as the single diamond among circles (i.e., a shape singleton), an irrelevant singleton distractor, such as the single red circle among the green stimuli (i.e., a c...

The proposition that feedback is never necessary in speech recognition is examined for utterances consisting of sequences of words. In running speech the features near word boundaries are often modified according to language-dependent rules. Application of these rules during word recognition requires top-down processing. Because isolated words are not usually modified by rules, their recognitio...

Two experiments investigated the influence of top-down information on adult age differences in the ability to search for singleton targets using spatial cues. In Experiment 1, both younger and older adults were equally able to use target-related top-down information (target feature predictability) to avoid attentional capture by uninformative (25% valid) cues. However, during informative (75% v...

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the ass...

| The classical view of information processing in the cortex is that of a bottom-up process in a feed-forward hierarchy. However there is psychophysical, anatomical and physiological evidence that top-down eeects play a crucial role in the processing of input stimuli. Hardly anything is known about the neural mechanisms underlying these effects. Here we investigate a physiologically inspired mo...

Visual perception is not only based on incoming visual signals but also on information about a multimodal reference frame that incorporates vestibulo-proprioceptive input and motor signals. In addition, top-down modulation of visual processing has previously been demonstrated during cognitive operations including selective attention and working memory tasks. In the absence of a stable gravitati...

All cortical and thalamic levels of sensory processing are subject to powerful top-down influences, the shaping of lower-level processes by more complex information. New findings on the diversity of top-down interactions show that cortical areas function as adaptive processors, being subject to attention, expectation, and perceptual task. Brain states are determined by the interactions between ...

Speech perception is formed based on both the acoustic signal and listeners' knowledge of the world and semantic context. Access to semantic information can facilitate interpretation of degraded speech, such as speech in background noise or the speech signal transmitted via cochlear implants (CIs). This paper focuses on the latter, and investigates the time course of understanding words, and ho...

In contrast to animal studies, relatively little is known about the functional significance of the early evoked gamma band activity in humans. We investigated whether evoked and induced 40 Hz activity differentiate automatic, bottom-up aspects of attention from voluntary, top-down related attentional demands. An auditory novelty-oddball task was applied to 14 healthy subjects. As predicted, mor...