Vidhya Navalpakkam | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Top-down attention selection is fine grained.

Although much is known about the sources and modulatory effects of top-down attentional signals, the information capacity of these signals is less known. Here, we investigate the granularity of top-down attentional signals. Previous theories in psychophysics have provided conflicting evidence on whether top-down guidance is coarse grained (i.e., one gain control term per feature dimension) or fine grained (i.e., multiple gain control terms per dimension). We resolve the conflict by designing new experiments that disentangle top-down from bottom-up contributions, thereby avoiding confounds existing in previous studies. The results of our eye-tracking experiments show that subjects can selectively saccade to items belonging to the relevant feature interval compared with irrelevant intervals within a dimension. This suggests that top-down signals can specify not only the relevant feature dimension but also the relevant feature interval within a dimension. We conclude that top-down signals are fine grained and can specify multiple gain control terms per dimension.

Attention↗

PubMed2005

Modeling the influence of task on attention.

We propose a computational model for the task-specific guidance of visual attention in real-world scenes. Our model emphasizes four aspects that are important in biological vision: determining task-relevance of an entity, biasing attention for the low-level visual features of desired targets, recognizing these targets using the same low-level features, and incrementally building a visual map of task-relevance at every scene location. Given a task definition in the form of keywords, the model first determines and stores the task-relevant entities in working memory, using prior knowledge stored in long-term memory. It attempts to detect the most relevant entity by biasing its visual attention system with the entity's learned low-level features. It attends to the most salient location in the scene, and attempts to recognize the attended object through hierarchical matching against object representations stored in long-term memory. It updates its working memory with the task-relevance of the recognized entity and updates a topographic task-relevance map with the location and relevance of the recognized entity. The model is tested on three types of tasks: single-target detection in 343 natural and synthetic images, where biasing for the target accelerates target detection over twofold on average; sequential multiple-target detection in 28 natural images, where biasing, recognition, working memory and long term memory contribute to rapidly finding all targets; and learning a map of likely locations of cars from a video clip filmed while driving on a highway. The model's performance on search for single features and feature conjunctions is consistent with existing psychophysical data. These results of our biologically-motivated architecture suggest that the model may provide a reasonable approximation to many brain processes involved in complex task-driven visual behaviors.

Attention↗