A VISUAL BASED PROTO-CONSCIOUSNESS MODEL OF HUMAN THINKING

A Proto-object Based Visual Attention Model

One of the first steps of any visual system is that of locating suitable interest points, ‘salient regions’, in the scene, to detect events, and eventually to direct gaze toward these locations. In the last few years, object-based visual attention models have received an increasing interest in computational neuroscience and in computer vision, the problem, in this case, being that of creating a...

Where to look next?: Proto-object based priority in a TVA-based model of visual attention

A model of proto-object based saliency

Organisms use the process of selective attention to optimally allocate their computational resources to the instantaneously most relevant subsets of a visual scene, ensuring that they can parse the scene in real time. Many models of bottom-up attentional selection assume that elementary image features, like intensity, color and orientation, attract attention. Gestalt psychologists, however, arg...

Thinking about Consciousness

Elaborates a materialist view of consciousness. The central thesis of the book is that while conscious states are material, we humans have two quite different ways of thinking about them. We can think about them materially, as normal parts of the material world, but we can also think about them phenomenally, as states that feel a certain way. These two modes of thought refer to the same items i...

The thinking ape: the enigma of human consciousness.

What is the origin and nature of consciousness? If consciousness is common to humans and animals alike, what are the defining traits of human consciousness? Moderated by Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman, philosopher David Chalmers, expert in primate cognition Laurie Santos, and physician-scientist Nicholas Sc...