Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a model of selective attention that is part of a connectionist object recognition system called MORSEL MORSEL is capable of identifying multiple objects presented simultaneously on its"retina," but because of capacity limitations, MORSEL requires attention to prevent it from trying to do too much at once Attentional selection is performed by a network of simple computing units that constructs a variable-diameter "spotlight" on the retina, allowing sensory information within the spotlight to be preferentially processed. Simulations of the model demonstrate that attention is more critical for less familiar items and that attention can be used to reduce inter-item crosstalk The model suggests four distinct roles of attention in visual information processing, as well as a novel view of attentional selection that has characteristics of both early and late selection theories.