Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Computations Of Top-Down Attention By Modulating V1 Dynamics, David Berga, Xavier Otazu

MODVIS Workshop

The human visual system processes information defining what is visually conspicuous (saliency) to our perception, guiding eye movements towards certain objects depending on scene context and its feature characteristics. However, attention has been known to be biased by top-down influences (relevance), which define voluntary eye movements driven by goal-directed behavior and memory. We propose a unified model of the visual cortex able to predict, among other effects, top-down visual attention and saccadic eye movements. First, we simulate activations of early mechanisms of the visual system (RGC/LGN), by processing distinct image chromatic opponencies with Gabor-like filters. Second, we use a cortical …

Object Recognition And Visual Search With A Physiologically Grounded Model Of Visual Attention, Frederik Beuth, Fred H. Hamker

MODVIS Workshop

Visual attention models can explain a rich set of physiological data (Reynolds & Heeger, 2009, Neuron), but can rarely link these findings to real-world tasks. Here, we would like to narrow this gap with a novel, physiologically grounded model of visual attention by demonstrating its objects recognition abilities in noisy scenes.

To base the model on physiological data, we used a recently developed microcircuit model of visual attention (Beuth & Hamker, in revision, Vision Res) which explains a large set of attention experiments, e.g. biased competition, modulation of contrast response functions, tuning curves, and surround suppression. Objects are represented by …