The perceptual boost of visual attention is task-dependent in naturalistic settings

Top-down attention allows people to focus on task-relevant visual information. Is the resulting perceptual boost task-dependent in naturalistic settings? We aim to answer this with a large-scale computational experiment. First, we design a collection of visual tasks, each consisting of classifying i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-04
Main Authors: Freddie Bickford Smith, Luo, Xiaoliang, Roads, Brett D, Love, Bradley C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Image classification
Neural networks
Visual tasks
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Top-down attention allows people to focus on task-relevant visual information. Is the resulting perceptual boost task-dependent in naturalistic settings? We aim to answer this with a large-scale computational experiment. First, we design a collection of visual tasks, each consisting of classifying images from a chosen task set (subset of ImageNet categories). The nature of a task is determined by which categories are included in the task set. Second, on each task we train an attention-augmented neural network and then compare its accuracy to that of a baseline network. We show that the perceptual boost of attention is stronger with increasing task-set difficulty, weaker with increasing task-set size and weaker with increasing perceptual similarity within a task set.
ISSN:2331-8422