Assessing, understanding, and modeling visual salience and its dynamical impact on perception and selection

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The project investigates how visual salience dynamically affects attentional and oculomotor selection and how these effects are related to the functional properties of the primary visual cortex (V1) and higher-order visual cortical areas. As a focus so far disregarded in psychological research and modeling, we will concentrate on temporal dynamics. We will probe experimentally salience effects within single fixations as well as those occurring over longer periods of time and multiple eye movements, to find out when salience derived from different visual feature dimensions affects visual selection and when not. We will develop a neurophysiologically plausible computational model incorporating the dynamics of salience effects. The model will be based on an existing salience model of V1 (Li 2002) and extended to account for differential salience effects as a function of feature dimension and, importantly, time.