stimulusdriven

Stimulus-driven is an adjective used in neuroscience, psychology, and related fields to describe processes, responses, or representations that are elicited primarily by external stimuli, as opposed to being generated by internal dynamics or spontaneous activity. In practice, the term distinguishes externally triggered responses from endogenous activity, prediction-based activity, or idle states. It is commonly used to refer to sensory-evoked neural responses or behavior that follows sensory input.

In sensory neuroscience, stimulus-driven responses are those that reliably accompany the presentation of a sensory stimulus. They are studied by presenting controlled stimuli and measuring neural activity, such as single-unit firing, local field potentials, EEG/MEG, or fMRI. Classic examples include orientation-tuned neurons in primary visual cortex that respond to edges at specific angles, or auditory neurons that fire to particular frequencies. These responses are contrasted with spontaneous or intrinsic activity that occurs without explicit sensory input.

In cognitive science, stimulus-driven (bottom-up) processes refer to attention and perception guided largely by salient sensory stimuli, rather than by prior knowledge or goals (top-down control). Stimulus-driven effects can influence reaction times, perceptual binding, and early perceptual processing, often swiftly and automatically.

In computational neuroscience, stimulus-driven models aim to predict neural responses from stimulus features. Encoding models map properties of the stimulus to measured activity, while decoding models reconstruct stimuli from neural signals. The term also appears in developmental and plasticity literature to describe experience-dependent changes driven by sensory input.