Vertioces treated differently after subdivide

I made this cube after which I subdivided the top layer with the Right Click-subdivide command. After that I again subdivided the front face, however I did it differently. This time I did not subdivide the whole selected surface, instead I selected only the left, right and bottom edges and subdivided those.

My problem is now I want to shrink the cube in the middle section. When I select the vertices however, the top ones are treated as surfaces except for the ones that are not highlighted. My guess is it’s because I subdivided edges into vertices instead of surfaces into sub-surfaces. How can I fix this so that the front face and the unselected top subdivisions are treated like the other ones?