Definition
The term “visual attention” refers to a set of cognitive operations that mediate the selection of relevant and the filtering out of irrelevant information from cluttered visual scenes.
Characteristics
In everyday life, visual scenes typically contain more items than can be processed at any one time due to the limited processing capacity of the visual system. “Visual attention” refers to the cognitive operations that allow us to efficiently deal with this capacity problem by selecting relevant information and by filtering out irrelevant information. Attention is a highly flexible mechanism that can operate on regions of space, particular features of an object, or on entire objects. Attention can also be directed either overtly or covertly. For instance, if a barking dog ran up to you, you would not only direct your attention towards it, but would also look directly at it, deploying overt attention. On the other hand, if you are driving a car, you might need to attend to an...
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References
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McMains, S.A., Kastner, S. (2009). Visual Attention. In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U. (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_6344
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_6344
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