it has been recognized that at least two forms of spatial attention can be found in vision. For example, Wundt (1902) observed that attention could be involuntary or voluntary. A variety of distinctions have been made that more or less correspond to Wundt’s distinction, including goal-directed attention versus stimulus-driven capture and endogenous attention versus exogenous attention. the term...

The human visual system solves an amazing range of problems in the course of everyday activities. Without conscious effort, the human visual system finds a place on the table to put down a cup, selects the shortest checkout queue in a grocery store, looks for moving vehicles before we cross a road, and checks to see if the stoplight has turned green. Inspired by the human visual system, I have ...

Somewhere between the retina and our conscious visual experience, the majority of the information impinging on the eye is lost. We are typically aware of only either the most salient parts of a visual scene or the parts that we are actively paying attention to. Recent research on visual neurons in monkeys is beginning to show how the brain both selects and discards incoming visual information. ...

It has been proposed that saccadic eye movements to visual targets are preceded by covert shifts of attention to these locations. In this review, we discuss the evidence for this hypothesis and the role of brain regions in directing rapid shifts of attention and gaze. We suggest there is a common neural architecture mediating both these types of movement.

Visual attention is one of the key mechanisms of perception that enables humans to efficiently select the visual data of most potential interest. Machines face similar challenges as humans: they have to deal with a large amount of input data and have to select the most promising parts. In this chapter, we explain the underlying biological and psychophysical grounding of visual attention, show h...

In the present review, we address the relationship between attention and visual stability. Even though with each eye, head and body movement the retinal image changes dramatically, we perceive the world as stable and are able to perform visually guided actions. However, visual stability is not as complete as introspection would lead us to believe. We attend to only a few items at a time and sta...

objective: deficits in the processing of facial emotions have been reported extensively in patients with schizophrenia. to explore whether restricted attention is the cause of impaired emotion processing in these patients, we examined visual attention through tracking eye movements in response to emotional and neutral face stimuli in a group of patients with schizophrenia and healthy individual...

This paper describes a method for visual surveillance based on biologically motivated dynamic visual attention in video image sequences. Our system is based on the extraction and integration of local (pixels and spots) as well as global (objects) features. Our approach defines a method for the generation of an active attention focus on a dynamic scene for surveillance purposes. The system segme...