Paying Attention to Meaning

Paying attention to meaning.

Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at d...

Paying attention to social meaning: an FMRI study.

Animations of simple geometric shapes are readily interpreted as animate agents engaged in meaningful social interactions. Such animations have been shown to activate brain regions implicated in the detection of animate motion, in understanding the intentions of others as well as areas commonly linked to the processing of social and emotional information. However, attribution of animacy does no...

Paying Attention to Memory

Paying Attention to Symmetry

Humans are very sensitive to symmetry in visual patterns. Symmetry is detected and recognized very rapidly, and eye fixations are concentrated along the axis of symmetry or the symmetrical center of the patterns. This suggests that symmetry is a highly salient feature. Existing computational models of saliency, however, have mainly focused on contrast as a measure of saliency. These models do n...

Paying attention to consciousness.

An engineering control approach is developed for the movement of attention, based on several features: experimental data indicating separate sites for attention modulation and for the creation of that modulation; the resulting analogy with motor control, to which an engineering approach has been applied; simulation and qualitative results supporting the presence of several of the necessary modu...