A Theory of Attention for Cognitive Systems

Attention provides a way to direct limited cognitive resources to a subset of available information. In the human case, this capacity enables selective mental processing, thereby shaping what we see, think, and do. Importantly, attention has the uncommon characteristic that people can direct it not only outward at objects, agents, and events in the world but also inward toward their own mental representations. In this way, attention naturally bridges perception, cognition, and action. In this paper, we describe a research program starting with six principles that comprise a core theory of attention. We then introduce an implemented, computational implementation of attention and discuss its relationship to those principles. Next, we report our progress on a computational model of visual attention, and demonstrate a task-oriented model that combines this perceptual model with executive control. We conclude with a review of related work, which emphasizes cognitive architectures, and with an overview of our current research agenda.