Control of Selective Visual Attention: Modeling the "Where" Pathway

It is a generally accepted fact that the computations of early vision are massively parallel operations, i.e., applied in parallel to all parts of the visual field. This high degree of parallelism cannot be sustained in in ermediate and higher vision because of the astronomical number of different possible combination of features. Therefore, it becomes necessary to select only a part of the instantaneous sensory input for more detailed processing and to discard the rest. This is the mechanism of visual selective attention.