VISUAL SELECTIVE ATTENTION - OUTLINES OF A CHOICE MODEL, A RACE MODELAND A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY

A computational theory of visual selective attention is presented. The theory developed out of a choice and a race model for visual selectio n from multi-element displays. The choice model (Bundesen, Pedersen, & Larsen, 1984) provides a rule for computation of selection probabilit ies, which accounts far effects of the selection criterion and the num bers of targets and distracters in the stimulus. The race model (Shibu ya & Bundesen, 1988) provides a process interpretation of the choice m odel and accounts for effects of the exposure duration of the stimulus . The computational theory (TVA; Bundesen, 1990) was constructed by in tegrating the race model with a biased-choice model for single-stimulu s recognition (Luce, 1963). TVA describes two mechanisms (filtering an d pigeonholing) by which selection is assumed to be carried out, and i t organizes a large body of empirical data on human performance in vis ual recognition and attention tasks. A recent theoretical development (CTVA; Logan, 1996; Logan & Bundesen, 1996) combines TVA with a theory of perceptual grouping by proximity. CTVA explains effects of spatial separation between items in multi-element displays. The neural locali zation of the operations described in TVA is considered in the final s ection.