Top-down effects within a distributed system: investigations and implications
Open AccessMeasuring and manipulating top-down effects is made more difficult by the interactivity that exists within a distributed architecture. Here, I elucidate how bidirectional influences between cognition and perception, rooted in their similarly recruited neural substrate, suggest that reified taxonomical divisions need to be reevaluated in terms of their benefit to the field. In Chapter 1, we leverage our understanding of this neural overlap along with known properties of visual cortex to make behavioral predictions regarding the temporal dynamics of this relationship. Chapter 2 suggests a functional mechanism for the engagement of prefrontal cortices in the working memory process. Thus, we search for an oscillatory pattern of activity between the two by parametrically manipulating the delay between memory encoding and perceptual stimulus presentation. Finally, Chapter 3 exists as a broad perspective on the field of cognitive neuroscience that challenges our existing approach to experimentation and suggests a task-centered generalization across physiology, behavior, and phenomenology, in order to appropriately advance the field. Allowing for distributed interactions that violate the putative conceptual boundaries of cognition and perception is necessary in understanding where the “top” and “bottom” of processing structures exist, and embracing this interactivity is crucial to understanding brain-behavior relationships.
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