ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how visual attention is deployed within an image as a function of image properties and observer goals. The modern study of visual attention began in the late 1960s with investigations of how much control observers have in attending to relevant objects and ignoring irrelevant ones. The mechanism that accomplishes selection is visual attention. Attention is said to be goal-driven when it is controlled by the observer's deliberate strategies and intentions. The first well-known claim that observers can direct attention to locations in space other than their current point of fixation was made by Helmholtz. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Posner and colleagues developed a technique for exploring top-down control over attention that extended the paradigm used by Eriksen. The experiments of Eriksen, Posner, and their colleagues established that attention could be directed to a spatial location. Attention effects are usually observed only when other, potentially competing, visual stimuli are present in the display.
