The time-course of human visual selection and recognition

在医学图像中发现肿瘤是视觉注意研究中经常提到的一个应用。使用各种复杂的仪表板，在崎岖或危险的地形上导航车辆，是另一种可以利用人类选择性注意的应用知识来改善的情况。正是这些任务的共同性质，以及如果进一步理解和考虑人类视觉选择的特性可以避免的潜在危险，使得对这些问题的讨论变得如此无处不在。鉴于视觉可以获得的信息量巨大，生物体的生存取决于快速选择这些信息的子集进行深度处理。由于我们的感知和认知资源有限，我们的视觉系统必须迅速确定复杂场景的哪些部分足够重要，值得进行全面处理和适当的反应。早期的选择机制几乎影响所有的视觉处理，这里提出的研究将增加我们对相关机制行为和交互方式的理解。此外，应将这些基本原则应用于改进任何需要人类用户注意或发现某些东西的设备的设计(例如，设计汽车仪表盘以提高安全性，设计雷达屏幕以减少目标检测的失误)。在某些情况下，为人类注意力系统设计糟糕的工具将产生比仅仅是低效更严重的影响，例如对司机和飞行员的展示。因此，除了澄清基本问题和在理论领域做出贡献外，这项工作还将为开发有效的软件工具和用户界面设备提供更重要的设计原则。

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.