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应用。驾驶车辆通过崎岖或危险的地形，使用各种复杂的仪表板，是另一种可以利用人类选择性注意的应用知识来改进的情况。正是这些任务的共同性质，以及如果人类视觉选择的特性得到进一步理解和考虑，就可以避免的潜在危险，使得这些问题的讨论无处不在。鉴于视觉可获得的信息数量庞大，生物体的生存取决于对这些信息子集的快速选择以进行深入处理。因为我们的感知和认知资源是有限的，我们的视觉系统必须迅速确定复杂场景的哪些部分是重要的，值得投入资源进行全面处理和适当的反应。

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.