The synergy of top-down and bottom-up attention in complex task: going beyond saliency models

This paper studies how visual perception of a scene is affected by cognitive processes beyond the scene's bottom-up saliency. The game of SET is taken as an example where contrast-based salient parts of a scene are ignored in favor of a larger group of similar elements. Using results from a laboratory experiment and a model simulation we explain how three cognitive mechanisms, differential acuity, visual iconic memory and declarative retrieval, considered together help to explain player's visual perception in SET.

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