Bottom up versus top-down attentional processing

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In my opinion, people with Autism & ADHD are guided by stimuli directed attention (bottom up) rather than top-down directed attention (goal oriented attentional processing), regardless of a persons attentional processing modality capability, or any attentional bottlenecks or buffers.

Good read below if you want to work ADHD to your advantage or to read around this area:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165017301000443

Aspies and autistics do often "see the trees and not the forest". NTs do the opposite. If thats what you mean.

Rings true. Makes sense. In my case, I'm terrible at working towards Goals, It's easier to stimulate myself.

Are you talking about inductive / deductive reasoning? Deconstruction?

I'm a deductive reasoner. A tree person (forest for the trees). I get lost in the trees.

One of my only arguments with my bf was because I was being excessively tree, and he didn't understand because he's a forest-seer.

In short, I dwell in the world of detail but can't put those details together to construct a big picture.

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Practical examples:

1)
If I'm looking for something in a shop with aisle labels, I'm lost. I was trying to find toothpicks once. I had no idea which aisle they would be in. I kept thinking "Picnics" lol, which doesn't even make sense. Art Supplies? (lol, no such aisle). Straws? Kitchen stuff? Paper plates? Household? I walked around and around and gave up because heaven forbid I ask someone. (This is a difficulty with inductive reasoning).

Later on another day I stumbled across toothpicks in the same shop. Where were they? DENTAL. I felt like such a moron. That hadn't even crossed my mind the first time.

Mind you, if someone said "What's in the DENTAL aisle?", I could deconstruct and break it down into 100 possible items including toothpicks. (Deductive reasoning).



2)
When I talk to my doctor I'll describe a symptom in minute detail for ten minutes and she'll stare at me like I'm mad. Turns out I just don't know the "label" or name for that symptom. It's usually something like "Oh, you're lightheaded", or "Oh, you have heartburn" .... instead of my 50 000 descriptions, but I can't put all the clues together to find those words.

How can somebody so seemingly articulate on the outside, be so confused on the inside.....Hmmnnn, I guess you cant always read a book by it's cover. People might LOOK like they got it all together, but they say ASD is hidden disability after-all. THEM: "but you're so smart!?"

Yes, i too also get lost in the trees, i have good attention to detail, i see things others don't, i always point out details that others miss, Me: "did you see that? did you see that, and that!" Them: "ya wot?.... I was busy. I wasn't paying attention."

But i think i'm versatile to see bigger picture concepts,also, if i force myself to. It's hard to know how others people think, process, things, you can only go by behavioral markers, flags, traits.

I've been under the impression there was a huge marketing study in defining the aisles, how often to switch it up, and the logic for what goes where next to whatelse? I always believed they put dairy in the farthest corner as it was the most common and force people to walk past other items such as ice cream.

https://infogrocery.com/common-aisles-grocery-store

One way I've found that helps me see the forest instead of focusing on the individual trees (so to speak) is to treat a set of trees and label it "forest", and see that Set as an object in and of itself, applying the same methods on the set as you would work with the individual objects in that set.

The problem with seeing the individual trees rather than the set of trees (forest) arise from the fact that you'd like to know more about the behavior of that individual object.

Example:

"The trees had leaves and the forest was green."

Now, as a typical aspie you might wonder about "what is a tree? How does it carry leaves? How does that make the forest green?"

This has not so much to do about learning. It has to do with your interest in the specific subject.

One might be more interested in learning more about how the green-ness arise because of the biological compositions reflecting mostly the photons of certain wavelenghts producing the color "green", while others might be more interested in knowing more about the minimum distance between each tree in a forest.

In classrooms you are forced to learn about stuff which basically has no interest of yours.

One example in my youth was when I attended a class about physics and chemistry, at that time the two were linked.

It caught my attention with the atoms, but when they began discussing the chemistry they lost my attention because I was disappointed for not learning more about the wave mechanics of Quantum Physics and the Double Slit Experiment.