ULTIMATE UX DICTIONARY, Uncategorized

Top-Down & Bottom-Up Attention

bottom-up and top-down attention, or stimulus-driven and goal-oriented attention (Carrasco,2011; Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000). Top-down attention refers to the voluntary allocation of attention to certain features, objects, or regions in space. For instance, a subject can decide to attend to a small region of space in the upper-left corner or to all red items. Both cases are examples of top-down attention, the first of top-down spatial attention, the latter of top-down feature attention (Beauchamp, Cox, & Deyoe, 1997; Bressler, Tang, Sylvester, Shulman, & Corbetta, 2008; Giesbrecht, Woldorff, Song, & Mangun, 2003). On the other hand, attention is not only voluntarily directed. Salient stimuli can attract attention, even though the subject had no intentions to attend to these stimuli (Schreij, Owens, & Theeuwes, 2008; Theeuwes, 1991,1992). For instance, if a subject is engaged in a conversation, but a loud bang occurs, this bang may attract attention. Or, in the visual domain, someone may be looking for red items, but an unexpected, sudden appearance of a nonred object may inadvertently draw the attention of the subject.

The similarity in top-down and bottom-up deployments of attention is that, although the reason for attentional deployment is different, the effects are largely the same. In both cases, the attended objects receive preferential processing. In both cases, this leads to an increased neural response, which has functional consequences, such as better memory storage (Buschman & Miller, 2007; Ciaramelli, Grady, & Moscovitch, 2008; Reynolds & Chelazzi, 2004).

However, there are also important differences between both types of attention. Top-down attention is also referred to as endogenous or sustained attention, and bottom-up attention is commonly typified as exogenous or transient attention (Carrasco, 2011). This difference in nomenclature is employed for a good reason: Top-down attention is called endogenous because, unlike bottom-up attention (which is automatic/involuntary), it is under clear voluntary control. Importantly, top-down attention is called sustained, since subjects typically direct their top-down attention at objects, features, or regions in space for sustained periods of time, whereas bottom-up attention is transiently captured. Moreover, top-down attention seems to take longer to deploy than bottom-up attention, approximately 300 and 100–120 ms, respectively (Cheal, Lyon, & Hubbard, 1991; Hein, Rolke, & Ulrich, 2006; Ling & Carrasco, 2006; Liu, Stevens, & Carrasco, 2007; Muller & Rabbitt, 1989; Nakayama & Mackeben, 1989; Remington, Johnston, & Yantis, 1992).

https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2194099

Top-Down & Bottom-Up Attention

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