An attempt to derive a comprehensive theory of attention from both neurobiological and psychological data.

This 5000-page masterwork is literally the last word on the topic and will be an essential resource for many. Unique in its breadth and detail, this encyclopedia offers a comprehensive and highly readable guide to a complex and fast-expanding field. The five-volume reference work gathers more than 10,000 entries, including in-depth essays by internationally known experts, and short keynotes explaining essential terms and phrases. In addition, expert editors contribute detailed introductory chapters to each of 43 topic fields ranging from the fundamentals of neuroscience to fascinating developments in the new, inter-disciplinary fields of Computational Neuroscience and Neurophilosophy. Some 1,000 multi-color illustrations enhance and expand the writings.

Attention: Theory and Practice provides a balance between a readable overview of attention and an emphasis on how theories and paradigms for the study of attention have developed. The book highlights the important issues and major findings while giving sufficient details of experimental studies, models, and theories so that results and conclusions are easy to follow and evaluate. Rather than brushing over tricky technical details, the authors explain them clearly, giving readers the benefit of understanding the motivation for and techniques of the experiments in order to allow readers to think through results, models, and theories for themselves. Attention is an accessible text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in psychology, as well as an important resource for researchers and practitioners interested in gaining an overview of the field of attention.

Paying attention is something we are all familiar with and often take for granted, yet the nature of the operations involved in paying attention is one of the most profound mysteries of the brain. This book contains a rich, interdisciplinary collection of articles by some of the pioneers of contemporary research on attention. Central themes include how attention is moved within the visual field; attention's role during visual search, and the inhibition of these search processes; how attentional processing changes as continued practice leads to automatic performance; how visual and auditory attentional processing may be linked; and recent advances in functional neuro-imaging and how they have been used to study the brain's attentional network

In typical child development, attention controls many aspects of learning, including memory, motor control, and problem solving. Attention organizes the constant influx of information that needs to be absorbed by children. Inside Visual Attention in Children: Theories and Activities, Dr. Kenneth A. Lane describes the positive aspects of attention that are needed for children to be successful in the classroom, such as concentration and vigilance, as opposed to negative aspects that can lead to failure, such as distractibility and confusion. This book is divided into two parts. The first eight chapters of the book explain attention and its relationship to vision and visual stimuli. The core topics discussed here include Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Executive Function, and Memory. The second half outlines a Vision Therapy program and consists of activities for improving visual attention in children. Over 100 activities are explained and illustrated. Visual Attention in Children: Theories and Activities is anchored on current theories in five areas of attention that shape child development. Theories Described Include: Focused Attention – The ability to respond discreetly to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli Selective Attention – The ability to maintain behavioral or cognitive abilities in the face of distracting or competing stimuli Shifting Attention – The ability to rapidly shift attention from one object to another Sustained Attention – The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral response during a continuous or repetitive activity Divided Attention –The ability to engage in more than one attention-focused task at one time Visual Attention in Children: Theories and Activities is the perfect tool for occupational therapy students and clinicians as well as other professionals specializing in child development and learning who are looking to enhance their understanding of this topic and who need unique ideas and activities to add to their visual therapy training programs.

The derivation, exposition, and justification of the Selective Tuning model of vision and attention. Although William James declared in 1890, "Everyone knows what attention is," today there are many different and sometimes opposing views on the subject. This fragmented theoretical landscape may be because most of the theories and models of attention offer explanations in natural language or in a pictorial manner rather than providing a quantitative and unambiguous statement of the theory. They focus on the manifestations of attention instead of its rationale. In this book, John Tsotsos develops a formal model of visual attention with the goal of providing a theoretical explanation for why humans (and animals) must have the capacity to attend. He takes a unique approach to the theory, using the full breadth of the language of computation—rather than simply the language of mathematics—as the formal means of description. The result, the Selective Tuning model of vision and attention, explains attentive behavior in humans and provides a foundation for building computer systems that see with human-like characteristics. The overarching conclusion is that human vision is based on a general purpose processor that can be dynamically tuned to the task and the scene viewed on a moment-by-moment basis. Tsotsos offers a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of attention theories and models and a full description of the Selective Tuning model, confining the formal elements to two chapters and two appendixes. The text is accompanied by more than 100 illustrations in black and white and color; additional color illustrations and movies are available on the book's Web site.

Visual attention is a relatively new area of study combining a number of disciplines: artificial neural networks, artificial intelligence, vision science and psychology. The aim is to build computational models similar to human vision in order to solve tough problems for many potential applications including object recognition, unmanned vehicle navigation, and image and video coding and processing. In this book, the authors provide an up to date and highly applied introduction to the topic of visual attention, aiding researchers in creating powerful computer vision systems. Areas covered include the significance of vision research, psychology and computer vision, existing computational visual attention models, and the authors' contributions on visual attention models, and applications in various image and video processing tasks. This book is geared for graduates students and researchers in neural networks, image processing, machine learning, computer vision, and other areas of biologically inspired model building and applications. The book can also be used by practicing engineers looking for techniques involving the application of image coding, video processing, machine vision and brain-like robots to real-world systems. Other students and researchers with interdisciplinary interests will also find this book appealing. Provides a key knowledge boost to developers of image processing applications Is unique in emphasizing the practical utility of attention mechanisms Includes a number of real-world examples that readers can implement in their own work: robot navigation and object selection image and video quality assessment image and video coding Provides codes for users to apply in practical attentional models and mechanisms