Combining bottom-up and top-down attentional influences

Visual attention to salient and relevant scene regions is crucial for an animal's survival in the natural world. It is guided by a complex interplay of at least two factors: image-driven, bottom-up salience [1] and knowledge-driven, top-down guidance [2, 3]. For instance, a ripe red fruit among green leaves captures visual attention due to its bottom-up salience, while a non-salient camou aged predator is detected through top-down guidance to known predator locations and features. Although both bottom-up and top-down factors are important for guiding visual attention, most existing models and theories are either purely top-down [4] or bottom-up [5, 6]. Here, we present a combined model of bottom-up and top-down visual attention.

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