• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.119-133
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• 1998

Attentional processes facilitate cognitive and behavioral performance in several ways. Attention serves to reduce the amount of information to receive. Attention enables humans to direct themselves to appropriate aspects of external environmental events and internal operations. Attention facilitates the selection of salient information and the allocation of cognitive processing appropriate to that information. Attention is not a unitary process that can be localized to a single neuroanatomical region. Before the cortical registration of sensory information, activation of important subcortical structures occurs, which is called as an orienting response. Once sensory information reaches the sensory cortex, a large number of perceptual processes occur, which provide various levels of perceptual resolution of the critical features of the stimuli. After this preattentional processing, information is integrated within higher cortical(heteromodal) systems in inferior parietal and temporal lobes. At this stage, the processing characteristics can be modified, and the biases of the system have a direct impact on attentional selection. Information flow has been traced through sensory analysis to a processing stage that enables the new information to be focused and modified in relation to preexisting biases. The limbic and paralimbic system play significant roles in modulating attentional response. It is labeled with affective salience and is integrated according to ongoing pressures from the motivational drive system of the hypothalamus. The salience of information greatly influences the allocation of attention. The frontal lobe operate response selection system with a reciprocal interaction with both the attention system of the parietal lobe and the limbic system. In this attentional process, the search with the spatial field is organized and a sequence of attentional responses is generated. Affective, motivational and appectitive impulses from limbic system and hypothalamus trigger response intention, preparation, planning, initiation and control of frontal lobe on this process. The reticular system, which produces ascending activation, catalyzes the overall system and increases attentional capacity. Also additional energetic pressures are created by the hypothalamus. As psychophysiological measurement, skin conductance, pupil diameter, muscle tension, heart rate, alpha wave of EEG can be used. Event related potentials also provide physiological evidence of attention during information process. NI component appears to be an electrophysiological index of selective attention. P3 response is developed during the attention related to stimulus discrimination, evaluation and response.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.177-197
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• 2010

Three experiments compared two hypotheses on visual selection; perceptual load hypothesis and dilution hypothesis. The perceptual load hypothesis predicts that perceptual load of task-relevant processing determines the level of task-irrelevant processing whereas the dilution hypothesis predicts that competition for limited-capacity attentional resource, not perceptual load, determines the locus of selection. To compare the two hypotheses, we investigated the influence of perceptual load in visual search on response interference by a distractor. Experiment 1 and 2 manipulated perceptual load by the set size of a search array and the colors of a target and non-targets, respectively. As a result, distractor interference decreased with a set size regardless of perceptual load. In order to further test the set size effect, Experiment 3 manipulated the perceptual categories of non-targets and a distractor. The results showed that distractor interference decreased only when non-targets belonged to the same category as a distractor. Overall, the current findings support the dilution hypothesis, but not the perceptual load hypothesis, and provide the evidence that visual selection is constrained by capacity-limited, category-specific attentional resources.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1-15
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• 1999

Based on known physiological and psychophysical results, a neural network model for visual selection, called FeaureGate is proposed. The model consists of a hierarchy of spatial maps. and the flow of information from each level of the hierarchy to the next is controlled by attentional gates. The gates are jointly controlled by a bottom-up system favoring locations with unique features. and a top-down mechanism favoring locations with features designated as target features. The present study focuses on the top-down mechanism of the FeatureGate model that produces results similar to Moran and Desimone's (1985), which many current models have failed to explain, The FeatureGate model allows a consistent interpretation of many different experimental results in visual attention. including parallel feature searches and serial conjunction searches. attentional gradients triggered by cuing, feature-driven spatial selection, split a attention, inhibition of distractor locations, and flanking inhibition. This framework can be extended to produce a model of shape recognition using upper-level units that respond to configurations of features.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.3-10
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• 2022

Memorability is an indicator of how well a stimulus can be remembered. Studies on memorability have shown that stimulus memorability cannot be explained by the perceptual and semantic properties of a stimulus, suggesting that memorability is an intrinsic property of a stimulus. Though real-world scenes almost always contain multiple objects, previous studies on memorability have mainly tested memory performance using a single stimulus. In the current study, we investigated how multiple stimuli with different levels of memorability interact with each other. Participants were asked to remember a high or low memorability target presented with a high or low memorability distractor in the encoding block. Participants' memory accuracy was measured by a sensitivity index in the testing block. Results showed that a high memorability target was easier to remember. However, the distractor memorability level did not modulate this target memorability effect. The current results support previous studies that showed a highly memorable stimulus does not automatically induce bottom-up attentional shifts.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.19-23
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• 1997

Attention is a phenomenon hard to define, but can be conceptualized as a mental function ranging from sustaining readiness to perceive stimuli to understanding the nature and value and selecting stimuli that are most relevant to the given situation. Manifestations of attention include vigilance, and focused, directed, selective, divided, and sustained attentions. While basic attentional tone is controlled by the interaction among reticular activating system, thalamus and prefrontal cortex, direction and selection of attention is controlled by neural circuits of prefrontal, posterior parietal, and limbic cortex. It is expected that understanding of attention and its neural control could provide answers to the relationship between pathophysiology and clinical symptoms of some major psychiatric disorders. More efforts are required to develop tools to assess more detailed and various aspects of attention in Korea.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.93-101
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• 2004

A face boundary can be approximated by an ellipse with five-dimensional parameters. This property allows an ellipse detection algorithm to be adapted to detecting faces. However, the construction of a huge five-dimensional parameter space for a Hough transform is quite unpractical. Accordingly, we Propose a selectively attentional Hough transform method for detecting faces from a symmetric contour in an image. The idea is based on the use of a constant aspect ratio for a face, gradient information, and scan-line-based orientation decomposition, thereby allowing a 5-dimensional problem to be decomposed into a two-dimensional one to compute a center with a specific orientation and an one-dimensional one to estimate a short axis. In addition, a two-point selection constraint using geometric and gradient information is also employed to increase the speed and cope with a cluttered background. After detecting candidate face regions using the proposed Hough transform, a multi-layer perceptron verifier is adopted to reject false positives. The proposed method was found to be relatively fast and promising.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2022

Lavie's perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995) proposes that the influence of distractors would be blocked as the load gets higher. Studies of perceptual load have usually adopted the flanker task, developed by Eriksen and Eriksen (1974), which measures reaction time on the target flanked by distractors. In the post-cueing forced task, participants should report the identity of the target cued later, and negative repetition effect (NRE) has often been observed. NRE means the effect that the accuracy of identification is worse when the target is flanked by the same nontargets than when flanked by different nontargets. This study has tried to check whether perceptual load has an effect on identification rate and NRE. Experiment 1 manipulated the similarity between targets and a distractor, and observed a tendency of NRE, but not the effect of perceptual load. Experiment 2 used 4, 2 (in two kinds of diagonal arrangement), or none distractors of the same identity to burden more perceptual load. NRE was significant and perceptual load showed significance but not a linear trend. Experiment 3 checked again whether NRE would be varied according to two levels of perceptual load strengthened by positional variability of load stimuli, but did not find the effect of perceptual load. It is concluded that perceptual load might have a limited effect on the early stage of perceptual processing due to divided attentional processing of the targets briefly exposed. Implications of this study were discussed.