Attention and Scene Understanding

Abstract: This paper presents a simplified, introductory view of how visual atThis paper presents a simplified, introductory view of how visual attention may contribute to and integrate within the broader framework of visual scene understanding. Several key components are identified which cooperate with attention during the analysis of complex dynamic visual inputs, namely rapid computation of scene gist and layout, localized object recognition and tracking at attended locations, working memory that holds a representation of currently relevant targets, and longterm memory of known world entities and their inter-relationships. Evidence from neurobiology and psychophysics is provided to support the proposed architecture.