Visual attention can be voluntarily directed toward stimuli and is attracted by stimuli that are emotionally significant. The present study explored the case when both processes coincide and attention is directed to emotional stimuli. Participants viewed a rapid and continuous stream of high-arousing erotica and mutilation stimuli as well as low-arousing control images. Each of the three stimul...

Voluntary control of attention promotes intelligent, adaptive behaviors by enabling the selective processing of information that is most relevant for making decisions. Despite extensive research on attention in primates, the capacity for selective attention in nonprimate species has never been quantified. Here we demonstrate selective attention in chickens by applying protocols that have been u...

Selective attention can enable a vision system to perform eeectively. The high-level vision component developed here uses Bayesian networks combined with a deictic representation to (1) create a dynamic structure to reeect the spatial organisation of the data and (2) measure task relatedness. Together these give at-tentional focus making the reasoning relevant to the task.

Recent findings demonstrate that faces with an emotional expression tend to attract attention more than neutral faces, especially when having some threat-related value (anger or fear). These findings suggest that discrimination of emotional cues in faces can at least partly be extracted at preattentive or unconscious stages of processing, and then serve to enhance awareness and behavioural resp...

This chapter presents a review of selective attention functioning in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The primary focus is on work conducted into this complex topic within the author and colleagues' laboratories (i.e. studies of simple and conjoined visual search). Findings obtained by the author and colleagues investigating simple and conjoined feature visual search in AD are related to findings obta...

Visual selective attention is the brain function that modulates ongoing processing of retinal input in order for selected representations to gain privileged access to perceptual awareness and guide behavior. Enhanced analysis of currently relevant or otherwise salient information is often accompanied by suppressed processing of the less relevant or salient input. Recent findings indicate that r...

Selective attention refers to the ability to restrict neural processing and behavioral responses to a relevant subset of available stimuli, while simultaneously excluding other valid stimuli from consideration. In primates and other mammals, descriptions of this ability typically emphasize the neural processing that takes place in the cerebral neocortex. However, non-mammals such as birds, rept...