Blue Cars, Robots, and How Your Brain Chooses to See
I distinctly remember this anecdote from my childhood. When it finally came time to upgrade our family car to a new model, I was assigned what was arguably the most important role in the decision-making process: picking the color. To my family’s horror, I chose a strange, never-seen-before, rare sea blue. In desperate attempts to defend my selection, I made a conscious effort to draw their attention to every blue car of the same precise shade that we encountered on the road.
What surprised my family (and honestly myself) was that there were so many of them! It seemed every third car on the road was suddenly that color. This rare shade had suddenly transformed into a ubiquitous one. Annoyed but convinced, my family gave up and bought that same color car.
Teenage me 1, family 0.
But wait a second—did the number of weird blue cars really just miraculously increase on the road? Or was it just me finally noticing them?
This is what behavioral scientists call top-down attention. I was looking specifically for blue cars, and so my brain consciously directed my vision to spot any cars of that shade on the road.
If there's top-down attention, then surely there must be a bottom-up. After all, what goes up must come down, right?
Here’s an example. The other day, I was in a mall with my toddler. He screamed “ROBOTTTTT” and pulled me away from my set path toward a very crowded part of the mall that I would have avoided under any other circumstance. I looked up and saw there was a huge transformer robot installation at the entrance of a toy store and that seemed to have caught his attention—exactly as it was meant to.
That, my friends, is a classic example of bottom-up attention. We weren’t specifically looking for robots, but a giant one suddenly made us take notice.
Understanding how our brains filter what we see and focus on can be a game-changer—especially for designers and product managers, trying to create a product that sticks. After all, attention is everything when it comes to user experience. In this article, we'll explore how top-down and bottom-up mechanisms interact with each other when users land on a screen, helping them decide what to notice and what to ignore. We will also discuss the relevance of this for product professionals and how they can use this knowledge to design better.
Diving into the Science of Attention
Think of it like this. Your senses capture so many things in just one moment, leaving your brain with the complex task of processing it all. We need a blueprint of sorts to figure out where to pay attention and what to actually look at. That’s where attentional mechanisms come into play.
Bottom-up mechanisms work based on salience. They automatically select objects that stand out: bright colors, something big, something new. Beyond an unexpectedly large robot in the mall, some examples of bottom-up attention in the design world include a banner on a website, pop-ups, ads, shimmers, calls to action, and so on.1 This term implies that attention is triggered by raw sensory data, which feeds “up” into the cognitive system and prompts a shift in focus—hence, why it is called bottom-up.
Top-down mechanisms, on the other hand, draw on our knowledge and goals. They help us intentionally locate what we want—like, for instance, the blue car I was looking for, the burger I am craving, a romantic comedy I want to watch, and more specifically in the digital realm, the search bar that can help me navigate the page. The name top-down comes from the idea that "higher" levels of cognition, such as decision-making or planning, direct lower sensory processes.
Psychologists have debated for a long time how these two mechanisms—bottom-up and top-down attention—co-exist and work together. While some believe that they work sequentially (one after the other), others argue they function completely independently of each other. Even within sequential processing, psychologists and neuroscientists still disagree on which type of processing happens first.
One study demonstrated that while bottom-up attention alerts us to salient items in our environment, top-down attention directs bottom-up to look at what we need to. Using different visual cues in experimental setups, the study showed that the requirement of the task often directs involuntary attention shifts, and hence, is actually contingent on the subconscious mind’s top-down targeting. So, according to this research, top-down attention sequentially happens first, and then bottom-up.2
But not everyone agrees. There could be contexts where the order might actually be reversed. Let’s say there is a swarm of green circles on the screen and you have been asked to find the lone red circle in the image. How can we determine if this is bottom-up attention at work (since you might spot what stands out) or top-down attention coming into play (since you have been tasked to find the red circle)?3
Neuroscience-based studies testing scenarios such as the one above suggest that it’s bottom-up processing that sweeps the scene first, regardless of the situation, which is then followed by some guidance from a top-down mechanism to land on the object.3
As you can see, these attention processes are pretty complex and context-dependent, and we don't have all the answers yet. But whether bottom-up or top-down attention kicks in first, one thing is clear: understanding how these mechanisms work is crucial for designers and product managers because when users land on your screen, both mechanisms will influence what they see and interact with your product.
References
- Sobel, K. V., Gerrie, M. P., Poole, B. J., & Kane, M. J. (2007). Individual differences in working memory capacity and visual search: The roles of top-down and bottom-up processing. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 14, 840-845.
- Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Johnston, J. C. (1992). Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human perception and performance, 18(4), 1030
- Connor, C. E., Egeth, H. E., & Yantis, S. (2004). Visual attention: bottom-up versus top-down. Current biology, 14(19), R850-R852.
- Lurie, N. H., & Mason, C. H. (2007). Visual representation: Implications for decision making. Journal of marketing, 71(1), 160-177.
About the Author
Preeti Kotamarthi
Preeti Kotamarthi has built and led Behavioral Science teams at two of the largest tech companies in Southeast Asia and India. She established the Behavioral Science practice at Grab, helping product and design teams understand customer behavior to create better user experiences. Currently, she heads Behavioral Science and User Research at Swiggy, where she continues to blend data, design, and human insights—drawing inspiration from spending a lot of time with Indian consumers. With a Masters in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics and an MBA in Marketing from FMS Delhi, Preeti brings over 12 years of experience in consumer products, from co-founding a rural startup in India to shaping behavioral design in tech. Her passion lies in making behavioral science a core part of the product development process. When she’s not uncovering human insights at work, she’s likely busy applying behavioral lessons on her two-year-old.
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