Guiding attention by cooperative cues

A common assumption in visual attention is based on the rationale of "limited capacity of information processing". From this view point there is little consideration of how different information channels or modules are cooperating because cells in processing stages are forced to compete for the limited resource. To examine the mechanism behind the cooperative behavior of information channels, a computational model of selective attention is implemented based on two hypotheses. Unlike the traditional view of visual attention, the cooperative behavior is assumed to be a dynamic integration process between the bottom-up and top-down information. Furthermore, top-down information is assumed to provide a contextual cue during selection process and to guide the attentional allocation among many bottom-tip candidates. The result from a series of simulation with still and video images showed some interesting properties that could not be explained by the competitive aspect of selective attention alone.