Style-Dependency of Melodic Expectation

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants’ aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top-down processing was manipulated by first allowing participants to view the paintings freely, then providing background information about each painting, and then allowing them to view the paintings a second time. The salience analysis showed differences between the eye movement behaviour of children and adults, and differences between the two phases. In the children, the first five fixations during the free viewing phase were strongly related to visually salient features of the paintings—indicating a strong role for bottom-up factors. In the second phase, after children had received background information, top-down factors played a more prominent role. By contrast, adults’ observed patterns were similar in both phases, indicating that bottom-up processes did not play a major role when they viewed the paintings. In the second phase, children and adults both spent more time looking at regions that were mentioned in the background information. This effect was greater for adults than for children, confirming the notion that adults, when viewing paintings, rely much more on top-down processing than children.

Wetland habitats are changing under multiple anthropogenic pressures. Nutrient leakage and pollution modify physico-chemical state of wetlands and affect the ecosystem through bottom-up processes, while alien predators affect the ecosystems in a top-down manner. Boreal wetlands are important breeding areas for several waterbird species, the abundances of which potentially reflect both bottom-up and top-down ecosystem processes. Here, we use long-term national monitoring data gathered from c. 130 waterbird breeding sites in Finland from the 1980s to the 2020s. We hypothesised that the physico-chemical state of the waters and increasing alien predator abundance both play a role in steering the waterbird population trends. We set out to test this hypothesis by relating population changes of 17 waterbird species to changes in water chemistry and to regional alien predator indices while allowing species-specific effects to vary with foraging niche (dabblers, invertivore divers, piscivorous divers, herbivores), nesting site, female mass and habitat (oligotrophic, eutrophic). We found niche and nesting site-specific, habitat-dependent changes in waterbird numbers. While the associations with higher phosphorus levels and browning water were in overall positive at the oligotrophic lakes, the numbers of invertivore and piscivore diving ducks were most strongly negatively associated with higher phosphorus levels and browning water at the eutrophic lakes. Furthermore, increased pH levels benefitted piscivores. Invertivore diving duck species nesting on the wetlands had declined most on sites with high alien predator indices. Large herbivorous species and species preferring oligotrophic lakes seem to be successful. We conclude that the large-scale breeding waterbird decline in Finland is closely connected to both bottom-up and top-down processes, where negative associations are emphasised especially at eutrophic lakes. Niche-, nest site- and habitat-specific management actions are required to conserve declining waterbird populations. Managing wetlands on catchments level together with alien predator control may provide important approaches to future wetland management.

Like many dual process theories in the psychological sciences, existing models of prospective memory (i.e., remembering to execute future intentions) emphasize the role of singular top-down or bottom-up processes that act in isolation. We argue that top-down and bottom-up processes are interconnected and dynamically interact to support prospective memory. We elaborate on this dynamic multiprocess framework by focusing on recent behavioral, neuroimaging, and eye-tracking research that demonstrated the dynamic nature of monitoring (top-down) and spontaneous retrieval (bottom-up) processes in relation to contextual factors, metacognition, and individual differences. We conclude that identifying how dual processes interact with environmental and individual difference factors is crucial for advancing understanding of cognition and behavior.

Apex predators perform important functions that regulate ecosystems worldwide. However, little is known about how ecosystem regulation by predators is influenced by human activities. In particular, how important are top-down effects of predators relative to direct and indirect human-mediated bottom-up and top-down processes? Combining data on species' occurrence from camera traps and hunting records, we aimed to quantify the relative effects of top-down and bottom-up processes in shaping predator and prey distributions in a human-dominated landscape in Transylvania, Romania. By global standards this system is diverse, including apex predators (brown bear and wolf), mesopredators (red fox) and large herbivores (roe and red deer). Humans and free-ranging dogs represent additional predators in the system. Using structural equation modelling, we found that apex predators suppress lower trophic levels, especially herbivores. However, direct and indirect top-down effects of humans affected the ecosystem more strongly, influencing species at all trophic levels. Our study highlights the need to explicitly embed humans and their influences within trophic cascade theory. This will greatly expand our understanding of species interactions in human-modified landscapes, which compose the majority of the Earth's terrestrial surface.

Travelling Educational Change and Cultural Diversity in the Czech Republic

Neurophysiological and behavioural research has linked observational practice (OP) to a mirroring mechanism encompassing the action-observation network (AON). Although, the original findings indicate that biological stimuli alone activate the AON, recent evidence has shown sensitivity to non-biological stimuli. Thus, the AON is suggested to be influenced by interacting bottom-up and top-down processes. In this review, we describe the multi-functional properties of the AON and discuss the implications for OP and subsequent motor learning.

This article argues that North does not conceptualise the difference between ideologies as shared beliefs, which arise from shared mental models in consequence of bottom-up processes, and ideologies as views which stimulate top-down institutional processes, by means of which informal norms and existing beliefs are re-oriented. Top-down processes are possible because shared beliefs are characterised by variety and malleability, rather than by a (homogeneous) “cultural heritage”. Although in North’s theory the reciprocal influence between informal and formal norms is interpretable as an alternation of bottom-up and top-down processes, he does not develop this perspective.

The congruency sequence effect (CSE), or Gratton effect, describes diminished congruency effects (i.e., faster responses for <<<<< vs. <<><< stimuli in a flanker task) on trials following an incongruent trial compared to those following a congruent trial. Traditionally, the CSE is regarded as an index of conflict adaptation. Accounts of the CSE have typically emphasized either top-down (cognitive control) or bottom-up (associative) processes. To disentangle top-down and bottom-up contributions to the CSE, we compared performance on versions of Simon and flanker tasks that control for memory and learning effects present in the standard versions of these tasks with the standard tasks. We analyzed the data using a recently developed model that explains conflict effects in terms of attention-shifting dynamics, the revised diffusion model for conflict tasks. Our modeling analyses suggest the CSEs in both Simon tasks are mainly driven by across-trial changes in the way attention is loaded onto distractor information, consistent with top-down control. In contrast, for both flanker tasks, our model-based analysis does not provide clear evidence favoring either top-down or bottom-up contributions to the CSEs overall. Furthermore, we fit the standard version of these tasks while separately analyzing trials based on whether the response was repeated or alternated across successive trials. Model fits suggest a combination of both influences, with different patterns for congruent and incongruent trials. Performance benefits on congruent trials are driven by adjusting how attention is loaded onto distractor information based on the previous congruency types (i.e., top-down influence). However, on incongruent trials, asymmetrical repetition benefits are mainly due to faster memory retrieval (i.e., bottom-up influence) and reactive attentional control. Our findings highlight that a more nuanced and integrated theoretical framework is necessary to capture the interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes in explaining control mechanisms when analyzing different response sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Databases of consistent, directed- and weighted inter-areal connectivity for mouse, macaque and marmoset monkeys have recently become available and begun to be used to build structural and dynamical models. A structural hierarchy can be defined based by laminar patterns of cortical connections. A large-scale dynamical model of the macaque cortex endowed with a laminar structure accounts for empirically observed frequency-modulated interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes. Signal propagation in the model with spiking neurons displays a threshold of stimulus amplitude for the activity to gain access to the prefrontal cortex, reminiscent of the ignition phenomenon associated with conscious perception. These two examples illustrate how connectomics inform structurally based dynamic models of multi-regional brain systems. Theory raises novel questions for future anatomical and physiological empirical research, in a back-and-forth collaboration between experimentalists and theorists. Directed- and weighted inter-areal cortical connectivity matrices of macaque, marmoset and mouse exhibit similarities as well as marked differences. The new connectomic data provide quantitative information for structural and dynamical modeling of multi-regional cortical circuit providing insight to the global cortical function. Quantification of cortical hierarchy guides investigations of interplay between bottom-up and top-down information processes.

The core tenet of modernization theory is that as nation-states develop both economically and socially, they will inevitably transition to democracy. Yet, despite 30-years of robust economic development and growth, including increases in civil society, democracy remains elusive in China. In this article, we conduct a critical and empirical analysis to understand the challenges and possibilities of democratization in China. Should China transition to democracy, it will most likely occur through a top-down process that transforms the state and its institutions of government or through a cooperative pact by joint forces of top-down and bottom-up processes. Under either a converted or cooperative transition, the modeling in this study strongly suggests that China is likely to be successful should it undertake the process of democratization.

Investigating automatic processing preference in high trait anxiety individuals: Behavioral and neuroelectrophysiological evidence.

A severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement is one major criterion for diagnosis of learning disability (LD). This manuscript describes the shortcomings of this paradigm and offers a new dynamic approach for LD assessment based on evaluation of LD during a standard learning process of how to read and write a new language. The dynamic learning disability (DLD) test, K-ABC IQ test, and K-ABC reading test were administered to 56 normal 4th grade students and to 48 LD students. It was hypothesized that the results using the conventional criteria may mismatch the results of DLD, and that DLD predicts the progress of students in a long-term group learning process better. The results indicated that LD students, as a group, manifested significant difficulties in the DLD test. Among 48 students who meet the conventional criteria for LD diagnosis 14 students (29.16%) were able to learn a new language in the DLD test (Inconsistent LD sub-group). From the 14 students who have low achievement in reading without serious indications of cognitive difficulties, six students (42.857%) manifested serious difficulties in learning a new language in the DLD test (Latent LD sub-group). The DLD test as well as the labels of the sub-groups was validated by the amount of progress in the long-term group learning process. The DLD test proved to have high reliability and predictive validity coefficients. It is suggested that it become part of the diagnostic battery of tests of LD.

Human visual attention is an area of research that has a strong effect on the field of human-robot-interaction. It has various applications for human-care robots and service robots. The ability of human visual attention to acquire knowledge on informative objects through interaction with the environment is an important research issue in the field of human-computer interaction and augmented cognition. Such knowledge can be acquired by automatically detecting visually attentive regions using the fixation extracted from eye-tracking data. Therefore, the optimal fixation must be selected from human eye-tracking data to detect the region of interest. In this paper, eye movement tracking was accurately used to capture human eye movements and to characterize the location and extent of a user's interest as an input mechanism to drive the interaction system. Furthermore, both top-down and bottom-up processes of the human visual system were at work in the process of selective attention. The correlation between human eye movement information and the bottom-up saliency map was calculated and compared with the correlation that was calculated by combining the top-down and bottom-up processes. The experiment results showed that the human visual attention system cannot be constructed with the bottom-up process alone and requires the combination of the top-down and bottom-up processes together.

As top-down based approaches of object recognition from video are getting more powerful, a structured way to combine them with bottom-up grouping processes becomes feasible. When done right, the resulting representation is able to describe objects and their decomposition into parts at appropriate spatio-temporal scales. We propose a method that uses a modern object detector to focus on salient structures in video, and a dense optical flow estimator to supplement feature extraction. From these structures we extract space-time volumes of interest (STVIs) by smoothing in spatio-temporal Gaussian Scale Space that guides bottom-up grouping. The resulting novel representation enables us to analyze and visualize the decomposition of an object into meaningful parts while preserving temporal object continuity. Our experimental validation is twofold. First, we achieve competitive results on a common video object segmentation benchmark. Second, we extend this benchmark with high quality object part annotations, DAVIS Parts 1, on which we establish a strong baseline by showing that our method yields spatio-temporally meaningful object parts. Our new representation will support applications that require high-level space-time reasoning at the parts level.

Gestalt Psychology and the Development of Perceptual Organization