Friston and co-workers have applied his ideas to modeling attention. For example, in the following paper they state: "We have suggested recently that perception is the inference about causes of sensory inputs and attention is the inference about the uncertainty (precision) of those causes (Friston, 2009).

The STAR architecture was designed to test the value of the full Selective Tuning model of visual attention for complex real-world visuospatial tasks and behaviors. However, knowledge of how humans solve such tasks in 3D as active observers is lean. We thus devised a novel experimental setup and examined such behavior. We discovered that humans exhibit a variety of problem-solving strategies whose breadth and complexity are surprising and not easily handled by current methodologies. It is apparent that solution methods are dynamically composed by hypothesizing sequences of actions, testing them, and if they fail, trying different ones. The importance of active observation is striking as is the lack of any learning effect. These results inform our Cognitive Program representation of STAR extending its relevance to real-world tasks.

Learned networks in the domain of visual recognition and cognition impress in part because even though they are trained with datasets many orders of magnitude smaller than the full population of possible images, they exhibit sufficient generalization to be applicable to new and previously unseen data. Although many have examined issues regarding generalization from several perspectives, we wondered If a network is trained with a biased dataset that misses particular samples corresponding to some defining domain attribute, can it generalize to the full domain from which that training dataset was extracted? It is certainly true that in vision, no current training set fully captures all visual information and this may lead to Selection Bias. Here, we try a novel approach in the tradition of the Thought Experiment. We run this thought experiment on a real domain of visual objects that we can fully characterize and look at specific gaps in training data and their impact on performance requirements. Our thought experiment points to three conclusions: first, that generalization behavior is dependent on how sufficiently the particular dimensions of the domain are represented during training; second, that the utility of any generalization is completely dependent on the acceptable system error; and third, that specific visual features of objects, such as pose orientations out of the imaging plane or colours, may not be recoverable if not represented sufficiently in a training set. Any currently observed generalization in modern deep learning networks may be more the result of coincidental alignments and whose utility needs to be confirmed with respect to a system's performance specification. Our Thought Experiment Probe approach, coupled with the resulting Bias Breakdown can be very informative towards understanding the impact of biases.

The study of attentional processing in vision has a long and deep history. Recently, several papers have presented insightful perspectives into how the coordination of multiple attentional functions in the brain might occur. These begin with experimental observations and the authors propose structures, processes, and computations that might explain those observations. Here, we consider a perspective that past works have not, as a complementary approach to the experimentally-grounded ones. We approach the same problem as past authors but from the other end of the computational spectrum, from the problem nature, as Marr's Computational Level would prescribe. What problem must the brain solve when orchestrating attentional processes in order to successfully complete one of the myriad possible visuospatial tasks at which we as humans excel? The hope, of course, is for the approaches to eventually meet and thus form a complete theory, but this is likely not soon. We make the first steps towards this by addressing the necessity of attentional control, examining the breadth and computational difficulty of the visuospatial and attentional tasks seen in human behavior, and suggesting a sketch of how attentional control might arise in the brain. The key conclusions of this paper are that an executive controller is necessary for human attentional function in vision, and that there is a 'first principles' computational approach to its understanding that is complementary to the previous approaches that focus on modelling or learning from experimental observations directly.

When engineers first endeavored to teach computers to see, they took it for granted that computers would see like humans. The first proposals for computer vision in the 1960s were "clearly motivated by characteristics of human vision," said John Tsotsos, a computer scientist at York University. Things have changed a lot since then. Computer vision has grown from a pie-in-the-sky idea into a sprawling field. Computers can now outperform human beings in some vision tasks, like classifying pictures -- dog or wolf?

In a new study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accomplish with ease. "It's a clever and important study that reminds us that'deep learning' isn't really that deep," said Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University who was not affiliated with the work. The result takes place in the field of computer vision, where artificial intelligence systems attempt to detect and categorize objects. They might try to find all the pedestrians in a street scene, or just distinguish a bird from a bicycle (which is a notoriously difficult task). The stakes are high: As computers take over critical tasks like automated surveillance and autonomous driving, we'll want their visual processing to be at least as good as the human eyes they're replacing.