Visual Awareness and Instrument Design

Visual design recommendations for situation awareness in social media

The use of online Social Media is increasingly popular amongst emergency services to support Situational Awareness (i.e. accurate, complete and real-time information about an event). Whilst many software solutions have been developed to monitor and analyse Social Media, little attention has been paid on how to visually design for Situational Awareness for this large-scale data space. We describ...

Visual attention: Spotlights, highlights and visual awareness

The phenomenon of visual attention has long fascinated scientists interested in higher functions of the brain. Introspection suggests that attention exerts a powerful influence on the flow of visual information within our brains: everyone is familiar with the experience of attending so intently to a particular object in the visual world that he/she is oblivious to other salient stimuli present ...

3 . Visual Attention and Visual Awareness

Primary visual cortex and visual awareness.

The primary visual cortex (V1) is probably the best characterized area of primate cortex, but whether this region contributes directly to conscious visual experience is controversial. Early neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies found that visual awareness was best correlated with neural activity in extrastriate visual areas, but recent studies have found similarly powerful effects in V1. ...

Visual Awareness and Visuomotor Action

Recent work in "embodied, embedded" cognitive science links mental contents to largescale distributed effects: dynamic patterns implicating elements of (what are traditionally seen as) sensing, reasoning and acting. Central to this approach is an idea of biological cognition as profoundly "action-oriented" geared not to the creation of rich, passive inner models of the world, but to the cheap a...