title: Modeling the influence of task on attention.
abstract: We propose a computational model for the task-specific guidance of visual attention in real-world scenes. Our model emphasizes four aspects that are important in biological vision: determining task-relevance of an entity, biasing attention for the low-level visual features of desired targets, recognizing these targets using the same low-level features, and incrementally building a visual map of task-relevance at every scene location. Given a task definition in the form of keywords, the model first determines and stores the task-relevant entities in working memory, using prior knowledge stored in long-term memory. It attempts to detect the most relevant entity by biasing its visual attention system with the entity's learned low-level features. It attends to the most salient location in the scene, and attempts to recognize the attended object through hierarchical matching against object representations stored in long-term memory. It updates its working memory with the task-relevance of the recognized entity and updates a topographic task-relevance map with the location and relevance of the recognized entity. The model is tested on three types of tasks: single-target detection in 343 natural and synthetic images, where biasing for the target accelerates target detection over twofold on average; sequential multiple-target detection in 28 natural images, where biasing, recognition, working memory and long term memory contribute to rapidly finding all targets; and learning a map of likely locations of cars from a video clip filmed while driving on a highway. The model's performance on search for single features and feature conjunctions is consistent with existing psychophysical data. These results of our biologically-motivated architecture suggest that the model may provide a reasonable approximation to many brain processes involved in complex task-driven visual behaviors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Psychology and Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Southern California, Hedco Neuroscience Building, Room 30A, Mail Code 2520, 3641 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520, USA. navalpak@usc.edu
authors.forename: Vidhya
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Navalpakkam
authors.forename: Laurent
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Itti
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*