Pre-attentive and attentive vision module

This paper introduces a new vision module, called PAAV, developed for the cognitive architecture ACT-R. Unlike ACT-R’s default vision module that was originally developed for top-down perception only, PAAV was designed to model a wide range of tasks, such as visual search and scene viewing, where pre-attentive bottom-up processes are essential for the validity of a model. PAAV builds on attentive components of the default vision module and incorporates greater support for modeling pre-attentive components of human vision. The module design incorporates the best practices from existing models of vision. The validity of the module was tested on four different tasks. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.