Definition
Attention – the ability of a sensory system to facilitate the processing of specific information at the expense of disregarding the remainder.
Bottom-up processes – information processing in the nervous system that operates in a feedforward way, advancing from sensory organs or areas at a low level of the cortical processing hierarchy.
Top-down influence – modulatory signals in the nervous system that originate from areas at a high level of the cortical processing hierarchy, influencing information processing in lower areas.
Saliency – a measure of the magnitude of the difference of a stimulus from its neighbors in space and time.
Detailed Description
The Case for Attention
Evolution has provided humans and other highly evolved species with powerful sensory systems. While our cortical processing capacity has also evolved and grown impressively, the torrent of information provided by our sensors far outstrips our ability to process it all. In addition, most of the sensory...
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Schwedhelm, P., Treue, S. (2014). Attentional Top-Down Modulation, Models of. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_566-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_566-1
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