Abstract
I will introduce the two of the goals of early visual processing in human vision, efficient coding and information selection. Then I will focus on the second goal of information selection, which in the research community is often referred to as visual attentional selection. There are two types of selection, one is pre-attentive, goal independent, or bottom-up, the other is attentive, goal-directed, or top-down. The experimental data on human pre-attentive selection will be introduced, and I will then present the development, modeling, and experimental tests of the theory that the primary visual cortex computes from visual input an explicit map of saliency in input in order to direct attention to conspicuous location.
