Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 May 17:4:276.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00276. eCollection 2013.

What is Bottom-Up and What is Top-Down in Predictive Coding?

Karsten Rauss  1 , Gilles Pourtois
Affiliations

What is Bottom-Up and What is Top-Down in Predictive Coding?

Karsten Rauss et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Everyone knows what bottom-up is, and how it is different from top-down. At least one is tempted to think so, given that both terms are ubiquitously used, but only rarely defined in the psychology and neuroscience literature. In this review, we highlight the problems and limitations of our current understanding of bottom-up and top-down processes, and we propose a reformulation of this distinction in terms of predictive coding.

Keywords: V1; bottom-up; predictive coding; top-down; vision.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Bottom-up processing as a series of loops formed by ascending and descending connections between neighboring levels in a hierarchically organized system. For simplicity, levels L1–L4 are shown as consisting of three layers only (ascending input, descending input, and output).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Top-down effects as direct influences of a source region located at least two levels above the target region in a hierarchical predictive-coding system.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Al-Aidroos N., Said C. P., Turk-Browne N. B. (2012). Top-down attention switches coupling between low-level and high-level areas of human visual cortex. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 14675–14680 10.1073/pnas.1202095109 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Alink A., Schwiedrzik C. M., Kohler A., Singer W., Muckli L. (2010). Stimulus predictability reduces responses in primary visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 30, 2960–2966 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3730-10.2010 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Awh E., Belopolsky A. V., Theeuwes J. (2012). Top-down versus bottom-up attentional control: a failed theoretical dichotomy. Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.) 16, 437–443 10.1016/j.tics.2012.06.010 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bacon-Mace N., Mace M. J., Fabre-Thorpe M., Thorpe S. J. (2005). The time course of visual processing: backward masking and natural scene categorisation. Vision Res. 45, 1459–1469 10.1016/j.visres.2005.01.004 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bao M., Yang L., Rios C., He B., Engel S. A. (2010). Perceptual learning increases the strength of the earliest signals in visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 30, 15080–15084 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5703-09.2010 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources