ABSTRACT
Selective visual attention is the mechanism by which we can rapidly direct our gaze towards objects of interest in our visual environment [2, 4, 5, 18, 26, 35, 52, 53]. From an evolutionary viewpoint, this rapid orienting capability is critical in allowing living systems to quickly become aware of possible prey, mates or predators in their cluttered visual world. It has become clear that attention guides where to look next based on both bottom-up (image-based) and top-down (task-dependent) cues [26]. As such, attention implements an information processing bottleneck, only allowing l-58488-362-6/04/$0.00+$ 1.50
a small part of the incoming sensory information to reach short-term memory and visual awareness [9, 15]. That is, instead of attempting to fully process the massive sensory input in parallel, nature has devised a serial strategy to achieve near real-time performance despite limited computational capacity: Attention allows us to break down the problem of scene understanding into rapid series of computationally less demanding, localized visual analysis problems.
