Top-down predictions in the cognitive brain

Top-down predictions in the cognitive brain.

The human brain is not a passive organ simply waiting to be activated by external stimuli. Instead, we propose that the brain continuously employs memory of past experiences to interpret sensory information and predict the immediately relevant future. The basic elements of this proposal include analogical mapping, associative representations and the generation of predictions. This review concen...

Top-Down Discourse Predictions in Natural Language Generation

Impulsivity, Compulsivity, and Top-Down Cognitive Control

Impulsivity is the tendency to act prematurely without foresight. Behavioral and neurobiological analysis of this construct, with evidence from both animal and human studies, defines several dissociable forms depending on distinct cortico-striatal substrates. One form of impulsivity depends on the temporal discounting of reward, another on motor or response disinhibition. Impulsivity is commonl...

Top down predictions moderate visual appearance of attended objects

Early experiments on iconic memory suggested that people initially experience a detailed visual image but can report only a few cued items. We hypothesized that strong top down predictions would allow for visual experience of only task relevant information. In a change detection task we manipulated the appearance of visual stimuli in the critical part of the experiment by removing up to 70

Top-down versus bottom-up learning in cognitive skill acquisition

This paper explores the interaction between implicit and explicit processes during skill learning, in terms of top-down learning (that is, learning that goes from explicit to implicit knowledge) versus bottom-up learning (that is, learning that goes from implicit to explicit knowledge). Instead of studying each type of knowledge (implicit or explicit) in isolation, we stress the interaction bet...