Top-Down Attentional Control

Biological analogue to ESR where top-down mechanisms detect distracting inputs and redirect processing

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

framework

Attention Schema Theory
implements
Theory by Graziano linking consciousness to a predictive model of attention; listed in Butlin et al. 2023.

concept

top-down control
related_to
Higher levels (tissue, organ, bioelectric pattern) causally influence lower-level events; key for evolutionary and engineering interventions.
Endogenous Steering Resistance
analogous_to
The central phenomenon introduced by this paper: inference-time recovery from irrelevant activation steering in LLMs

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Bottom Up Controlconcept0.809
Top-down Causationconcept0.780
How higher organizational levels constrain and facilitate the behavior of parts by deforming their energy landscapes.
controlconcept0.758
The act of directing a system's behavior; the objective of a regulator.
ESR parallels endogenous attention control in biological systems where top-down mechanisms detect distracting inputs and redirect processingclaim0.755
Cross-domain analogy linking ESR to Attention Schema Theory
Top-Down Models in Biologyframework0.748
Pezzulo and Levin's framework for explanation and control of complex living systems above the molecular level, cited as prior work by Levin
Top-down predictive modelsconcept0.743
Generative models in the brain that predict sensory input; proposed to be physically stored in VSMC motifs.
Control And Perception Loopframework0.738
Intentional control taskmethod0.734
Task instructing the model to write a sentence while thinking or not thinking about a word, measuring internal representation strength.