The ability to choose rapidly among multiple targets embedded in a complex perceptual environment is key to survival. Targets may differ in their reward value as well as in their low-level perceptual properties (e.g., visual saliency). Previous studies investigated separately the impact of either value or saliency on choice; thus, it is not known how the brain combines these two variables durin...

How do we ignore stimuli that are salient but irrelevant when our task is to select a lower salient stimulus? Since bottom-up processes favor high saliency, detection of a low-salient target in the presence of highly salient distractors requires top-down attentional guidance. Previous studies have demonstrated that top-down attention can modulate perceptual processing and also that the control ...

Saliency is the perceptual capacity of our visual system to focus attention (i.e. gaze) on relevant objects instead background. So far, computational methods for saliency estimation required explicit generation a map, process which usually achieved via eyetracking experiments still images. This tedious that needs be repeated each new dataset. In current paper, we demonstrate possible automatica...

During binocular rivalry, perception alternates between dichoptically presented incompatible images. With larger images, such perceptual alternations will typically start locally and then gradually spread across the image, known as traveling waves of perceptual dominance. Several image-features (such as local contrast) are known to determine where in the image a traveling wave originates. Here ...

Visual saliency plays an important role in early vision. Humans automatically orient to salient information, via covert attentional shifts and overt eye movements. Here, we measured saliency using a novel psychophysical method. The stimulus was a grid of colored oriented lines. Line luminance varied continuously over the image. Using a mouse, participants adjusted line luminance at locations in...

Two recent papers (Foulsham, Barton, Kingstone, Dewhurst, & Underwood, 2009; Mannan, Kennard, & Husain, 2009) report that neuropsychological patients with a profound object recognition problem (visual agnosic subjects) show differences from healthy observers in the way their eye movements are controlled when looking at images. The interpretation of these papers is that eye movements can be mode...

Dynamic cues have until recently been usually considered as a simple extension of the static saliency, usually in the form of optic flow between two frames. The evolution of stimuli over a period longer than two frames has been largely ignored in saliency research. We argue that considering temporal evolution of trajectory even for a relatively short period can significantly extend the kind of ...