Processing Streams in Early Vision

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

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Abstract

Attention selects what reaches our awareness. When our attention wanders, we can miss seeing something even when we are staring right at it, whether it is an approaching car, an edge of a ramp, or child playing in the street. Attention plays a critical role in organizing our mental processes and disorders of attention frequently accompany the major mental diseases. In this proposal we focus on three aspects of the early stages of visual attention. First, we use attentional tracking tasks to examine the properties of the selection map that indexes the attended spatial locations. Second, we study the spatial properties of the uptake of information from a single selection location, using spatial crowding tasks. Finally using a new technique with moving targets we isolate non-retinotopic postselection analyses. Attention is the final arbiter of what ^experience and the guide to our learning about the events around us. The more we learn about attention, the better we will be equipped to enhance mental function, improve learning strategies, construct optimal displays of information, deal with failures of attention, and better rehabilitate those with neurological impairments of attention.