0 used to refer to a situation in which decisions are made by a few people in authority rather than by the people who are affected by the decisions:
1 starting from the highest levels or from the most general ideas of an organization, system, plan, etc.:
A complete specification of the model will require more investigation of the role of top-down inhibition among representations.
Forthcoming procedures for the analysis of electroacoustic music should derive from the synthesis of top-down and bottom-up views derived from different competences.
Thus, the refinement of abstract model into a detailed one is, in their interpretation, a feature of top-down design.
Experimental test in lowland tropical forest shows top-down effects through four trophic levels.
Research results to back up this top-down relationship are easily found.
This approach relieves the problems existing in a bottom-up approach and those in a top-down approach.
Repeated spatial or temporal coincidences between top-down expectation signals and bottom-up input signals reinforce the relative weights of signal exchanges in a given neural circuit.
The electoral majority the government rests on is top-down, not bottom-up, and thus is not one created by the voters' expressed preferences.