In this issue of Neuron, Nandy et al. (2017) reveal a number of important new insights into the neural mechanisms that are responsible for attentional selection.

Traditional theories of attention rely on the idea that when we search for a target in a visual display the brain boosts the activity of neurons optimally tuned for the target features. In this issue of Neuron, Navalpakkam and Itti take a computational approach to show that this strategy is actually very inefficient when the target is surrounded by distractors with similar features. Instead, th...

Currently available empirical evidence is often insufficient to distinguish among developmental theories of word learning, categorization, and induction. This paper argues that theories of conceptual development should be evaluated not only on the basis of their ability to account for empirical findings, but also on the basis of their consistency with a broader body of knowledge, particularly w...

It is well recognized that individuals who are dependent on addictive drugs exert a bias in selective attention toward drug-related stimuli, which can influence their craving for the drug and their drug-taking behavior. Over the past decade, this phenomenon of attentional bias has grabbed the attention of many researchers in the field of addiction. The observation that disruptions in cognitive ...

With the goal of automated reading comprehension, we apply a neural network with Bidirectional Attention Flow (BiDAF) to the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and achieve F1 and Exact Match (EM) scores close to the original paper with a single model. We obtain a test F1 score of 76.037 and test EM score of 66.663. Our model includes Character-level CNN embeddings, a Highway Network la...

Two experiments are reported which examine how manipulations of visual attention affect adult speakers’ linguistic choices regarding word order and verb use when describing simple visual scenes. Participants in Experiment 1 were presented with scenes designed to elicit the use of one of two perspective verbs (e.g., “A dog is chasing a man”/“A man is running from a dog”). Speakers’ visual attent...