Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation to investigate developmental differences in the ...

We present a new segment-based method for saliency detection based on multi-size superpixels that combines local and global saliency cues. We extract superpixels at several scales and represent each superpixel with a normal distribution in CIE-Lab space estimated from its associated pixels. Global saliency is computed by grouping similar superpixels to estimate the spatial distribution of color...

Biological visual systems are highly adapted to the image statistics of the natural world. A particularly important aspect of the statistics of natural scenes is the arrangements of edges they contain. Here, we examined how different arrangements of edges influence human perceptual saliency using a binocular rivalry paradigm. We constructed fields of randomly positioned Gabor patches with orien...

Older adults often experience hearing difficulties in multitalker situations. Attentional control of auditory perception is crucial in situations where a plethora of auditory inputs compete for further processing. We combined an intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm with attentional manipulations to study adult age differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attention...

It has been suggested that saliency mechanisms play a role in perceptual organization. This work evaluates the plausibility of a recently proposed generic principle for visual saliency: that all saliency decisions are optimal in a decision-theoretic sense. The discriminant saliency hypothesis is combined with the classical assumption that bottom-up saliency is a center-surround process to deriv...

I propose that perceptual learning of tasks to detect targets among uniform background items involves changing intra-cortical interactions in the primary visual cortex (V1). This is the case for tasks that rely mainly on bottom-up saliency to guide attention to the task relevant locations quickly, and rely less on top-down knowledge of the stimuli or on other strategies. In particular, suppress...

Video quality assessment (VQA) is very important in many video processing applications. For example, the rate-distortion (RD) optimization in video coding needs an efficient distortion metric to assess the RD cost of candidate coding parameters. However, most existing metrics employ little visual perceptual information, or some are too complex to meet real-time requirement. In this paper we pro...

Attention is intrinsic to our perceptual representations of sensory inputs. Best characterized in the visual domain, it is typically depicted as a spotlight moving over a saliency map that topographically encodes strengths of visual features and feedback modulations over the visual scene. By introducing smells to two well-established attentional paradigms, the dot-probe and the visual-search pa...

Most models of visual saliency operate on two-dimensional images, using elementary image features such as intensity, color, or orientation. The human visual system, however, needs to function in complex three-dimensional environments, where depth information is often available and may be used to guide the bottom-up attentional selection process. In this report we extend a model of proto-object ...