When bottom-up meets top-down

When bottom-up meets top-down.

Studying the intriguing question of how words or pictures are encoded, processed and stored has been a long-standing problem in cognition. Both the written word frog, and a picture of the animal, can lead to an observer to say /frog/, or otherwise to the association that frogs leap, croak, need water, etc. Two different types of account have been formulated to explain word and picture processin...

Bottom-up, top-down

When top-down meets bottom-up: auditory training enhances verbal memory in schizophrenia.

A critical research priority for our field is to develop treatments that enhance cognitive functioning in schizophrenia and thereby attenuate the functional losses associated with the illness. In this article, we describe such a treatment method that is grounded in emerging research on the widespread sensory processing impairments of schizophrenia, as described elsewhere in this special issue. ...

Multistable perception: when bottom-up and top-down coincide.

During prolonged observation of an ambiguous figure sudden perceptual reversals occur, while the stimulus itself stays unchanged. There is a vivid debate about whether bottom-up or top-down mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. In the present study, we investigated the interrelation of two experimental factors: volitional control and discontinuous stimulus presentation. Both factors strongly mod...

Top-down versus bottom-up: when instructions overcome automatic retrieval.

Research on human action has extensively covered controlled and automatic processes in the transformation of stimulus information into motor action, and how conflict between both types of processes is solved. However, the question of how automatic stimulus-response (S-R) translation per se depends on top-down control states remains unanswered. The present study addressed this issue by manipulat...