Selective attention is a filtering system that focuses on relevant information in our environment while irrelevant information is suppressed. The two well-known components of selective attention, facilitation and inhibition, work hand in hand to aid the processing of relevant information. The main theme of the present thesis was to study the inhibitory component of visual selective attention using stimuli such as motion and shape in a rapid serial visual presentation. Therefore, the first three experimental chapters investigated how relevant motion and shape information are processed and perceived in the presence of similar irrelevant information. The findings showed that first order visual motion detection is impaired in the presence of distracters and this inhibition of distracters is generated in a bottom-up manner. The findings were, however, not straightforward. The findings from Experiments 6-10 showed that distracter information (shape) influences shape target detection only when distracters are made salient and the perceptual load of the task is moderately difficult. Collectively, the findings in this present thesis suggest that there may be more than one kind of inhibition generated for different kinds of stimuli.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Alberta, 2010. / "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta." Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on February 12, 2010) Includes bibliographical references.

The studies presented in this thesis address current issues in visual attention and awareness research. The first three experimental chapters investigate saccadic remapping of location and orientation information, with a particular focus on saccadic remapping in hemianopia. The results suggest that residual visual abilities in the blind field are necessary in order for a stimulus to be remapped from the blind to the sighted visual field. The results also suggest that remapping underpins our ability to maintain attention at specific spatiotopic locations across a series of saccades. Further evidence from both hemianopic and neurologically intact participants suggest that some orientation information is remapped across saccades. The second three experimental chapters investigate binocular rivalry in previously unstudied paradigms. The results show that the established face dominance and emotion dominance effects in binocular rivalry persist when the stimuli are viewed in peripheral vision. The results also suggest that a stable image presented in the opposite hemifield from the rival pair does not affect the perceived dominance of the separate images within the rival pair, but that the percepts in the rival pair tend to synchronise with those of a second rival pair presented in the opposite hemifield. Using Diaz-Caneja stimuli (half of each image presented to each eye) the results of the final experiments suggest a combination of eye- and object-dominance mechanisms in binocular rivalry in both the intact and the split-brain.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

A common problem in vision research is explaining how humans perceive a coherent, detailed and stable world despite the fact that the eyes make constant, jumpy movements and the fact that only a small part of the visual field can be resolved in detail at any one time. This is essentially a problem of integration over time - how successive views of the visual world can be used to create the impression of a continuous and stable environment. A common way of studying this problem is to use complete visual scenes as stimuli and present a changed scene after a disruption such as an eye movement or a blank screen. It is found in these studies that observers have great difficulty detecting changes made during a disruption, even though these changes are immediately and easily detectable when the disruption is removed. These results have highlighted the importance of motion cues in tracking changes to the environment, but also reveal the limited nature of the internal representation. Change blindness studies are interesting as demonstrations but can be difficult to interpret as they are usually applied to complex, naturalistic scenes. More traditional studies of scene analysis, such as visual search, are more abstract in their formulation, but offer more controlled stimulus conditions. In a typical visual search task, observers are presented with an array of objects against a uniform background and are required to report on the presence or absence of a target object that is differentiable from the other objects in some way. More recently, scene analysis has been investigated by combining change blindness and visual search in the `visual search for change' paradigm, in which observers must search for a target object defined by a change over two presentations of the set of objects. The experiments of this thesis investigate change blindness using the visual search for change paradigm, but also use principles of design from psychophysical experiments, dealing with detection and discrimination of basic visual qualities such as colour, speed, size, orientation and spatial frequency. This allows the experiments to precisely examine the role of these different features in the change blindness process. More specifically, the experiments are designed to look at the capacity of visual short-term memory for different visual features, by examining the retention of this information across the temporal gaps in the change blindness experiments. The nature and fidelity of representations in visual short-term memory is also investigated by manipulating (i) the manner in which featural information is distributed across space and objects, (ii) the time for which the information is available, (iii) the manner in which observers must respond to that information. Results point to a model in which humans analyse objects in a scene at the level of features/attributes rather than at a pictorial/object level. Results also point to the fact that the working representations which humans retain during visual exploration are similarly feature- rather than object-based. In conclusion the thesis proposes a model of scene analysis in which attention and vSTM capacity limits are used to explain the results from a more information theoretic standpoint.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karolinska institutet, 2010.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering." Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-144).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 17, 2010). Directed by David Teachout; submitted to the School of Music. Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-206).

La thèse se propose d’analyser la structure esthétique de l’expérience cinématographique. On part d’une définition du film comme flux (audio-)visuel qui a un début, un déroulement et une fin. Partant du constat de ce principe constructif, la thèse entend montrer comment la structuration temporelle des films engendre des différences cognitives dans l'expérience spectatorielle. La notion de « structuration temporelle » renvoie à l'ordonnancement des plans et des sons dans leur durée en succession et/ou en simultanéité, tandis que l'adjectif « cognitif » fait référence aux processus d'acquisition et d'usage de nos connaissances. L’étude se fonde sur l'esthétique de Kant, la phénoménologie de Husserl, l'analyse du cinéma de Deleuze, l'Intentionnalité chez Searle, ainsi que la théorie esthétique et la théorie cognitive de la fiction de Schaeffer, dans une perspective interdisciplinaire et en prenant appui sur les données empiriques des sciences cognitives. La thèse déploie une analyse comparative du déroulement des processus de la réception cinématographique – la perception, l'attention et la compréhension – et rend compte des différents temps de cette réception, c’est-à-dire de la relation entre l'objet film et les spectateurs. L’objectif est double : il s’agit, d’une part, de mettre au jour les implications cognitives de la technique cinématographique dans l'expérience spectatorielle, en considérant notamment la fonction de cette technique et les principes, issus de l’Intentionnalité des auteurs, qui y sont inscrits ; et, d’autre part, d’évaluer la portée de ces principes constructifs et Intentionnels dans le cinéma contemporain, les dernières décennies ayant été marquées par une radicalisation progressive du rythme des films. Le cinéma devient à ce titre un exemple des structures temporelles qui soutiennent notre relation au monde réel. / The aim of this thesis is to analyze the aesthetic structure of the cinematographic experience. We depart from a definition of film as an (audio)visual flux with a beginning, an evolution, and an end. From the evidence of this constructive principle, this thesis intends to show how the temporal structure of films generates cognitive differences in the spectators' experience. The notion of “temporal structure” is related to the ordering of shots and sounds within their durations in succession and/or in simultaneity, while the adjective “cognitive” refers to the acquisition process and use of our knowledge. This study is based on Kant's aesthetics, Husserl's phenomenology, Deleuze's cinema analysis, Searle's Intentionality, and Schaeffer's aesthetic and fiction cognition theories, in an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on cognitive sciences empirical data. It is a comparative analysis of the unfolding of the cinematographic reception process – perception, attention and comprehension – and takes the different times of this reception into account, that is, the relation between the object film and the spectators. The objective is twofold: on the one hand it is a question of uncovering the cognitive implications of the cinematographic technique for the spectators' experience through close consideration of the functions of this technique and the principles which the authors’ Intentionality have inscribed upon it; on the other hand, it is a question of evaluating the scope of these constructive and Intentional principles on contemporary cinema, as recent decades have emphasized the progressive radicalization of filmic rhythm. Cinema becomes as such an example of the temporal structures that uphold our relation to the real world.

The research presented in this thesis was designed to investigate whether and how the temporal synchrony and spatial congruence of non-visual cues with visual targets could work together to improve the discrimination and identification of visual targets in neurologically-healthy adult humans. The speed and accuracy of participants’ responses were compared following the presence or absence of temporally synchronous and/or spatially congruent or incongruent auditory, vibrotactile, and audiotactile cues in the context of dynamic visual search and rapidly-masked visual target identification. The understanding of the effects of auditory, vibrotactile, and audiotactile cues derived from these laboratory-based tasks was then applied to an air traffic control simulation involving the detection and resolution of potential conflicts (represented as visual targets amidst dynamic and cluttered visual stimuli). The results of the experiments reported in this thesis demonstrate that, in the laboratory-based setting, temporally synchronous and spatially informative non-visual cues both gave rise to significant improvements in participants’ performance, and the combination of temporal and spatial cuing gave rise to additional improvements in visual target identification performance. In the real-world setting, however, only the temporally synchronous unimodal auditory and bimodal audiotactile cues gave rise to a consistent facilitation of participants’ visual target detection performance. The mechanisms and accounts proposed to explain the effects of spatial and temporal cuing, namely multisensory integration and attention, are examined and discussed with respect to the observed improvements in participants’ visual target identification performance.