Alvarez George A, Oliva Aude
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2008 Apr;19(4):392-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02098.x.
The representation of visual information inside the focus of attention is more precise than the representation of information outside the focus of attention. We found that the visual system can compensate for the cost of withdrawing attention by pooling noisy local features and computing summary statistics. The location of an individual object is a local feature, whereas the center of mass of several objects (centroid) is a summary feature representing the mean object location. Three experiments showed that withdrawing attention degraded the representation of individual positions more than the representation of the centroid. It appears that information outside the focus of attention can be represented at an abstract level that lacks local detail, but nevertheless carries a precise statistical summary of the scene. The term ensemble features refers to a broad class of statistical summary features that we propose collectively make up the representation of information outside the focus of attention.
注意力焦点内视觉信息的表征比注意力焦点外信息的表征更精确。我们发现，视觉系统可以通过汇聚有噪声的局部特征并计算汇总统计量来补偿撤回注意力的代价。单个物体的位置是一个局部特征，而几个物体的质心是一个代表物体平均位置的汇总特征。三个实验表明，撤回注意力对单个位置表征的影响比对质心表征的影响更大。看来，注意力焦点外的信息可以在缺乏局部细节的抽象层面上进行表征，但仍携带场景的精确统计汇总。术语“集合特征”指的是一类广泛的统计汇总特征，我们认为它们共同构成了注意力焦点外信息的表征。
