Top-down processes are thought to mediate volitional, goal-directed behavior in a moment-to-moment determination of what sensory information from bottom-up processes are salient, how attention is deployed, predictions about outcomes based on prior learning, and options for behavioral responses to bottom-up information about environmental conditions and the body milieu (Le Pelley et al., 2024). When these processes are functioning properly, a mismatch between bottom-up processes and outcome predictions from top-down processes facilitates learning to update the predictive model encoded in top-down brain networks.
