Controlling the Focus of Visual Selective Attention

Selecting only a subset of the available sensory information before further detailed processing is crucial for efficient perception. In the visual modality, this selection is frequently implemented by suppressing information outside a spatially circumscribed region of the visual field, the so-called "focus of attention." The model for the control of the focus of attention in primates presented here is based on a "Saliency Map" which is a topographic representation of the instantaneous saliency of the visual scene.