Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We introduce a new mechanism of selective attention among perceptual groups as part of a computational model of early vision. In this model, selection of objects is a two-stage process: perceptual grouping is first performed in parallel in connectionist networks which dynamically bind together the neural activities triggered in response to related features in the image; secondly, by locking its output on the quasi-peridic bursts of activity associated with a single perceptual group, a dynamic network called the phase-tracker of attention produces a temporal filter which retains the selected group for further processing, while rejecting the unattended ones. Simulations show that the network's behavior matches known psychological data that fit in the descriptive framework of object-based theories of visual attention.