title: Modeling attention to salient proto-objects.
abstract: Selective visual attention is believed to be responsible for serializing visual information for recognizing one object at a time in a complex scene. But how can we attend to objects before they are recognized? In coherence theory of visual cognition, so-called proto-objects form volatile units of visual information that can be accessed by selective attention and subsequently validated as actual objects. We propose a biologically plausible model of forming and attending to proto-objects in natural scenes. We demonstrate that the suggested model can enable a model of object recognition in cortex to expand from recognizing individual objects in isolation to sequentially recognizing all objects in a more complex scene.
authors.affiliation: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. walther@uiuc.edu
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Walther
authors.forename: Christof
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Koch
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D005246:Feedback; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D012372:ROC Curve