Abstract

Visual processes do not amount to a simple filtering process performed by a series of hierarchical modules. They allow to select the items immediately useful for the current action from the information included in the external scene. To perform this selection, attentional top-down controls must combine with bottom-up information issued from the retina. In the prospect to understand how these informations are fused together, a computational model of the first steps of the visual process able to account for the pre-attentional and attentional mechanisms involved in visual search has been developed. This model, called Competitive Search, integrates the dynamical aspects of a local dynamical architecture. It accounts for 'pop-out' and attentional phenomena involved in the search for conjunctive targets without introducing ad hoc hypothetical mechanisms such as the attentional spotlight hypothesis. It suggests that such metaphors, issued from the conventional cognitive psychology, may in fa...

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