Some primitive mechanisms of spatial attention

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90036-1

Cognition

Volume 50, Issues 1–3, April–June 1994, Pages 363-384

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90036-1 Get rights and content

Abstract

Our approach to studying the architecture of mind has been to look for certain extremely simple mechanisms which we have good reason to suspect must exist, and to confirm these empirically. We have been concerned primarily with certain low-level mechanisms in vision which allow the visual system to simultaneously index items at multiple spatial locations, and have developed a provisional model (called the FINST model) of these mechanisms. Among the studies we have carried out to support these ideas are ones showing that subjects can track multiple independent moving targets in a field of identical distractors, and that their ability to track these targets and detect changes occuring on them does not generalize to non-targets or to items lying inside the convex polygon that they form (so that a zoom lens of attention does not fit the data). We have used a visual search paradigm to show that (serial or parallel) search can be confined to a subset of indexed items and the layout of these items is of little importance. We have also carried out a large number of studies on the phenomenon known as subitizing and have shown that subitizing occurs only when items can be preattentively individuated and in those cases location precuing has little effect, compared with when counting occurs, which suggests that subitizing may be carried out by counting active indexes rather than items in the visual field. And finally we have run studies showing that a certain motion effect which is sensitive to attention can occur at multiple precued loci. We believe that taken as a whole the evidence is most parsimoniously accounted for in terms of the hypothesis that there is an early preattentive stage in vision where a small number of salient items in the visual field are indexed and thereby made readily accessible for a variety of visual tasks.

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^☆: The work reported herein was carried out under the author's direction at the Center for Cognitive Science, University of Western Ontario. Much of it has been reported in theses in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, by graduate students Brian Acton, Jacquie Burkell, Roy Eagleson, Paul McKeever, William Schmidt, Chris Sears and Lana Trick. These students, along with our Research Scientist Brian Fisher, contributed most of the empirical and theoretical work discussed in this paper. This research was supported by the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (Grant A2600) and by a “Project B-4” grant from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems.

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Some primitive mechanisms of spatial attention☆

Abstract

Cognitive Science

Cognition

Cognition

Cognition

Cognition

Cognitive Psychology

Cognition

Cognitive Psychology

A neural network model of spatial indexing

Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science

Indexing multiple loci in the visual field: Evidence for simultaneous facilitation in visual search

Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: A zoom lens model

Perception and Psychophysics

Multiple abrupt onset cues produce illusory line motion

Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science

Focal visual attention produces motion sensation in lines

Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science

An object-specific spatial attentional facilitation that does not travel to adjacent spatial locations

Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science

Curve tracing operation and the perception of spatial relations

Shifts in selective visual attention: Towards the underlying neural circuitry

Human Neurobiology

On the demystification of mental imagery

Behavioral and Brain Science