Top-down attention refers to the voluntary allocation of attention to certain features, objects, or regions in space. However, currently, two types of attention are commonly distinguished in the literature: bottom-up and top-down attention, or stimulus-driven and goal-oriented attention (Carrasco, 2011 Corbetta & Shulman, 2002 Desimone & Duncan, 1995 Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000). For instance, it may be that attention and consciousness are intertwined differently for top-down attention than for bottom-up attention. We hypothesize that this may have implications beyond our understanding of attention. We argue that the current results suggest that there are two attentional systems that operate independently. The use of Bayesian statistics strongly confirmed that performance on both tasks was uncorrelated. Importantly, in this robust investigation we did not observe any correlation in performance between tasks. Moreover, the high levels of significance we observed indicate that the current set-up provided very high signal to noise ratios, and thus enough power to accurately unveil existing effects. On both tasks we found typical performance-i.e., participants displayed a significant search slope on the search task and significant slowing caused by the unique, but irrelevant, object on the capture task. Abstract What is the relationship between top-down and bottom-up attention? Are both types of attention tightly interconnected, or are they independent? We investigated this by testing a large representative sample of the Dutch population on two attentional tasks: a visual search task gauging the efficiency of top-down attention and a singleton capture task gauging bottom-up attention.
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