Bottom Up and Top Down Attention
Bottom up attention refers to attention by stimuli. THis is important to human survival in the case of a danger. For example, If i was reading something and I heard the sound of something hitting the ground, my attention would respond to the noise stimuli and would be focusing on the noise. This is super important because if you hear a threat, it allows you to respond to the threat which could save your life. This type of attention has saved me many times. One time my sister was in the living room and I was in my room reading. My mom had yelled for us to leave the house because a big fire had started on the kitchen stove. If I hadn’t heard her yell because I was focused on my book I would have been in big trouble
Top down attention describes attention by knowledge, this is important because it allows you to focus on what you want and not be distracted by all the other information in front of you. This is especially important in school because when I am reading something in a book and my teacher asks me to find something, I can find it quickly in a lot of information.