The time-course of human visual selection and recognition

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Finding tumours in medical images is a commonly mentioned application for research on visual attention. Navigating a vehicle through rugged or dangerous terrain, using a variety of complicated instrument panels, is another situation that could be improved using applied knowledge about human selective attention. It is the common nature of these tasks, and the potential dangers that could be avoided if the properties of human visual selection were further understood and taken into account, that have made discussions of these issues so ubiquitous. Given the overwhelming amount of information available to vision, an organism's survival depends on fast selection of subsets of that information for in-depth processing.  Because our perceptual and cognitive resources are limited, our visual systems must quickly determine what portions of a complex scene are important enough to merit the resources required for full processing and appropriate response.Early selection mechanisms affect virtually all visual processing, and the research proposed here will increase our understanding of the way the relevant mechanisms behave and interact. In addition, these basic principles should be applied to improving the design of any piece of equipment which requires a human user to notice or find something (e.g., design of car dashboards to increase safety, design of radar screens to decrease lapses in target detection). In some instances tools that are badly designed for the human attention system will have effects more drastic than mere inefficiency, for example displays for drivers and pilots. Thus, in addition to clarifying basic issues, and making a contribution in the theoretical domain, this work will provide further important design principles for the development of effective software tools and user interface devices.