What part of the brain controls visual attention?
prefrontal cortex
A new study by MIT neuroscientists reveals how the brain achieves this type of focused attention on faces or other objects: A part of the prefrontal cortex known as the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) controls visual processing areas that are tuned to recognize a specific category of objects, the researchers report in …
What are visual searches?
Visual search is a goal oriented activity that occurs regularly in daily life and involves the active scanning of the environment in order to locate a particular target among irrelevant non-targets, or distractors.
Where is visual search used?
It has a host of applications in the eCommerce industry, particularly for fashion and home decor retailers. Visual search allows retailers to suggest thematically or stylistically related items to shoppers in a way they would struggle to do using a text query alone.
What variables affect a visual search?
It is guided to the most promising items and locations by five factors discussed here: bottom-up salience, top-down feature guidance, scene structure and meaning, the pre- vious history of search over timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, and the relative value of the targets and distractors.
Where is the visual area?
occipital lobe
The visual cortex is the primary cortical region of the brain that receives, integrates, and processes visual information relayed from the retinas. It is in the occipital lobe of the primary cerebral cortex, which is in the most posterior region of the brain.
What is stimulus driven attention?
Attention can also be captured by salient, novel, or behaviorally relevant properties of a stimulus. Here, we refer to this as stimulus-driven attention—attention that is guided based on the characteristics of a stimulus. Stimulus-driven attention includes aspects of both bottom-up and top-down attention.
What makes a visual search easy?
Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors). Visual search can take place with or without eye movements.
Why is visual search important?
Visual search, a vital task for humans and animals, has also become a common and important tool for studying many topics central to active vision and cognition ranging from spatial vision, attention, and oculomotor control to memory, decision making, and rewards.
How do humans conduct a visual search?
In visual search tasks, people are asked to find a visual stimulus amongst other visual stimuli (distracters). In a visual search experiment, a target is the item that you need to find. A distracter or distractor is an item that you are not looking for, and which distracts you from finding the target.
Is visual search selective attention?
Visual search is a key paradigm in attention research that has proved to be a test bed for competing theories of selective attention. A feature-integration theory of attention. …
How many visual areas are there?
The visual cortex is divided into six critical areas depending on the structure and function of the area. These are often referred to as V1, V2, V3, V4, V5, and the inferotemporal cortex. The primary visual cortex (V1) is the first stop for visual information in the occipital lobe.