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.