Top-down and/or Bottom-up Causality: The Notion of Relatedness in the Human Brain
There is an unsettled debate in neuroscience on the question of neural processes underlying impressions of causality. Some favor perceptual (bottom-up), others cognitive/inferential (top-down) approaches. We here try to disentangle and apply new definitio
- PDF / 118,679 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 17 Downloads / 269 Views
Top-down and/or Bottom-up Causality: The Notion of Relatedness in the Human Brain Kim C. Wende and Andreas Jansen
Abstract There is an unsettled debate in neuroscience on the question of neural processes underlying impressions of causality. Some favor perceptual (bottom-up), others cognitive/inferential (top-down) approaches. We here try to disentangle and apply new definitions to the functional categories “cognition” and “perception,” based on anatomically distinct neural processing systems in the human brain. Especially, the perceptual domain is not well defined, because it spans across “sensory”/morphological domains (non-lateralized) to “higher perceptual” domains (crossing of hemispheres in the visual cortex and correspondingly in the visual domain). Top-down influences very likely occur at different stages of neural information processing. Corresponding mental functions (sensing, perceiving, interpreting) might be integrated into one type of event during meaningful (meta-) cognition with extreme ends of the information dimension (0/1, causal/noncausal, or even/odd). We suggest that top-down “causation” and bottom-up “agency” are complimentary processes interacting across functional modalities and thereby forming one “unit” of explicit conscious experience/one “momentum” (Michotte in The perception of causality. Basic Books, Oxford, 1963 [1]; Kant in Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1781 [2]).
Keywords Causality Perception problem Human Language
Cognition
Consciousness
Brain–mind
K.C. Wende (&) Institute of Neurosciences IoNs, Groupe COSY, Université catholique de Louvain UCL, 53 av. Mounier, Boîte B1.53.4, 1200 Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] K.C. Wende A. Jansen Department of Brain-imaging, Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 R. Wang and X. Pan (eds.), Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (V), Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0207-6_24
169
170
24.1
K.C. Wende and A. Jansen
Introduction: Cause and Effect—A Complex Topic, but a Simple Relation (0/1)?
Regarding neural underpinnings of bottom-up causality perception, there are only few neuroscientific studies in the literature that target causality as type of relational information (0/1 or causal/noncausal). A major problem for neuroscientific research on causality perception is that formal task instructions are explicit and subjects are required to focus attention and observe the stimulus aware of this: the “formal cognition” domain is per se explicit and responses are confounded by attentional influences. Related to this, there are various top-down processes in the human brain, and here, too, causality is defined vaguely and also rather differently in various backgrounds of Psychology spanning from bottom-up perceptual [1–6], Bayesian [7], to interactive and top-down inferential/attributional [8–11], as well as representational learning/schema [12–15] models.
2
Data Loading...
