Chapter 11 Vision , Attention Control , and Goals Creation System

Biological visual attention has been long studied by experts in the field of cognitive psychology. The Holy Grail of this study is the exact modeling of the interaction between the visual sensory and the process of perception. It seems that there is an informal agreement on the four important functions of the attention process: (a) the bottom-up process, which is responsible for the saliency of the input stimuli; (b) the top-down process that bias attention toward known areas or regions of predefined characteristics; (c) the attentional selection that fuses information derived from the two previous processes and enables focus; and (d) the dynamic evolution of the attentional selection process. In the following, we will outline established computational solutions for each of the four functions.