NIPS 93 Announcement: Workshop on Selective Attention
Ernst Niebur
ernst at cns.caltech.edu
Tue Sep 21 16:06:36 EDT 1993
Fellow Connectionists:
We would like to announce the final program of a workshop on visual
selective attention to be held at this year's NIPS conference. The
conference will be held from Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 in Denver, CO, the
workshop will be held Dec. 3 and 4 "at a nearby ski area."
For NIPS conference and workshop registration info, please write to: NIPS*93
Registration / NIPS Foundation / PO Box 60035 / Pasadena, CA 91116-6035 USA
For questions concerning this workshop, please contact either of the
organizers by e-mail.
--Ernst Niebur
NIPS*93 Workshop: Neurobiology, Psychophysics, and Computational
================= Models of Visual Attention
Intended Audience: Experimentalists, modelers and others interested in
================== visual attention and high-level vision
Organizers:
===========
Ernst Niebur Bruno Olshausen
ernst at caltech.edu bruno at lgn.wustl.edu
Program:
========
In any physical computational system, processing resources are
limited, which inevitably leads to bottlenecks in the processing of
sensory information. Nowhere is this more evident than in the primate
visual system, where the massive amount of information provided by the
optic nerve far exceeds what the brain is capable of fully processing
and assimilating into conscious experience. Visual attention thus
serves as a mechanism for selecting certain portions of the input to
be processed preferentially, shifting the processing focus from one
location to another in a serial fashion. The study of visual
attention is integral to our understanding of higher visual function,
and it may also be of practical benefit to machine vision as well.
What we know of visual attention has been learned from a combination
of psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational approaches.
Psychophysical studies have revealed the behavioral consequences of
visual attention by measuring either a speed-up in observer's reaction
time or an improvement in discrimination performance when the observer
is attending to a task. Neurophysiological studies, on the other hand,
have attempted to reveal the neural mechanisms and brain areas
involved in attention by measuring the modulation in single cell
firing rate or in the activity in a part of the brain as a function of
the attentional state of the subject. A number of computational
models based on these studies have been proposed to address the
question of how attention eases the computational burdens faced by the
brain in pattern recognition or other visual tasks, and how attention
is controlled and expressed at the neuronal level.
The goal of this workshop will be to bring together experts from each
of these fields to discuss the latest advances in their approaches to
studying visual attention. Half the available time has been reserved
for informal presentations and the other half for discussion.
Morning session:
7:30-8:00 Introduction/overview
"Covert Visual Attention: The Phenomenon"
(Ernst Niebur, Caltech)
(7:50-8:00: Discussion)
8:00-9:00 Neurobiology
8:00 "Effects of Focal Attention on Receptive Field
Profiles in Area V4"
(Ed Connor, Washington University)
(8:20-8:30: Discussion)
8:30 "Neurophysiological evidence of scene segmentation
by feature selective, parallel attentive mechanisms"
(Brad Motter, VA Medical Center/SUNY-HSC, Syracuse)
(8:50-9:00: Discussion)
9:00-9:30 General Discussion
Afternoon session:
4:30-5:00 Psychophysics
"Attention and salience: alternative mechanisms of
visual selection"
(Jochen Braun, Caltech)
(4:50-5:00: Discussion)
5:00-6:00 Computational models
5:00 "Models for the neural implementation of attention
based on the temporal structure of neural signals"
(Ernst Niebur, Caltech)
(5:20-5:30: Discussion)
5:30 "Dynamic routing circuits for visual attention"
(Bruno Olshausen, Washington University/Caltech)
(5:50-6:00: Discussion)
6:00-6:30 General discussion
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