Abstract:

The article mainly discussed the top-down modulation on automatic process. Top-down modulation is setting the requirements of behaviors into a specific working pattern according to brain cortices. Priming is the facilitation or inhibition effect of primes on targets, which indicates automatic process. Nowadays, studies showed that automatic perception process, automatic semantic activation and automatic response induced by masked priming paradigm can be affected by top-down modulation factors, just as attention, task instructions, other task-related information and so on. So, the review focused on this field of researches and perspectives. Based on certain researches, automatic process elicited by masked priming can be modulated by attention, intention, task factors and so on. Thus, it is not totally automatic. And aging effect does exist in automatic process paradigms.

Key words: top-down, automatic process, masked priming, aging effect, cognition