Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that attentional selection processes are highly sensitive to the temporal order of task-relevant visual events. When two successively presented colour-defined target stimuli are separated by a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of only 10 ms, the onset latencies of N2pc components to these stimuli (which reflect their attentional selection) precisel...

Brain operation is profoundly rhythmic. Oscillations of neural excitability shape sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. Intrinsic oscillations also entrain to external rhythms, allowing the brain to optimize the processing of predictable events such as speech. Moreover, selective attention to a particular rhythm in a complex environment entails entrainment of neural oscillations to its tempo...

The natural world constantly inundates our senses with an abundance of information. Selective attention enables us to navigate this abundance intelligently by selecting the information that is most relevant, at each moment in time, for differential processing and decision-making. The attributes of attention have been studied in humans for over a century. In his influential 19(th) century treati...

Recent investigations that suggest selective attention (SA) is dependent on top-down control mechanisms lead to the expectation that individuals with high executive capacity (EC) would exhibit more robust neural indices of SA. This prediction was tested by using event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine differences in markers of information processing across 25 subjects divided into two groups...

How do we localise and identify target objects among distractors in visual scenes? The role of selective attention in visual search has been studied for decades and the outlines of a general processing model are now beginning to emerge. Attentional processes unfold in real time and this review describes four temporally and functionally dissociable stages of attention in visual search (preparati...

We demonstrate that selective attention can improve learning. Considerably fewer samples are needed to learn a source separation problem when the inputs are pre-segmented by the proposed model. The model combines biased-competition model for attention with a habituation mechanism which allows the focus of attention to switch from one object to another. The criteria for segmenting objects are es...

Early knowledge based systems did not incorporate high-bandwidth I/O due to performance limitations of computers of that era. Today, intelligent agents and robots running on much more powerful computers can incorporate vision, sound, network, sonar and other modes of input. These additional inputs provide much more information about the environment, but bring additional problems related to cont...

There is increasing evidence that invertebrates such as flies display selective attention (van Swinderen, 2011a), although parallel processing of simultaneous cues remains difficult to demonstrate in such tiny brains. Local field potential (LFP) activity in the fly brain is associated with stimulus selection and suppression (van Swinderen and Greenspan, 2003; Tang and Juusola, 2010), like in ot...

Self-control in one's food choices often depends on the regulation of attention toward healthy choices and away from temptations. We tested whether selective attention to food cues can be modulated by a newly developed proactive self-control mechanism-control readiness-whereby control activated in one domain can facilitate control in another domain. In two studies, we elicited the activation of...

Recent evidence shows that genetic variations in key regulators of serotonergic (5-HT) signaling explain variance in executive tasks, which suggests modulatory actions of 5-HT on goal-directed selective attention as one possible underlying mechanism. To investigate this link, 130 volunteers were genotyped for the 5-HT transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR) and for a variation (TP...