rethinking thinking
Rethinking Thinking: How Do Attention Mechanisms Actually Work?
Attention is a cognitive and behavioral function that gives us the ability to concentrate on a tiny portion of the incoming information selectively, which is advantageous to the task we are attending. It gives the brain the ability to confine the volume of its inputs by ignoring irrelevant perceptible information and selecting high-value information. When we observe a scene with a specific important part related to the task we are doing, we extract that part to process more meticulously; we can learn to focus on those parts more optimally when those scenes appear again. According to J. K Tsotsos et al. [1], the attention mechanism can be categorized into two classes. The first category is bottom-up unconscious attention -- saliency-based attention -- which is stimulated by external factors.