Attention to Visual Surfaces

Erik Blaser
Human Vision Laboratory
Psychology Department
UMass Boston

Under interesting conditions, visual attention is best understood as 
being allocated to an entire surface, as opposed to a particular feature 
or location. The surfaces themselves, it will be argued, are constructed 
according to ‘binding’ rules applied to information about the location 
of image features in 3D. Experiments will be described that isolate 
mechanisms that code the location of image features in depth; that hint 
at the rules that may goven the integration of this feature-location 
information into surfaces; and that show that these surfaces are 
legitimate targets for visual attention.