IBN: 9634357 PI: Niebur In order to avoid information overload, by far the largest part of the input to our sensory organs has to be discarded by the brain, and only carefully selected parts are allowed to influence behavior and to reach long-term memory. This process is called selective attention and it is the focus of intense research in psychology, neurobiology and the computational sciences. In this project, we will design and test analog VLSI chips which implement neurobiologically plausible models of the attentional selection process that we have developed previously. The system will be tested on standard visual search paradigms as used routinely in psychological experiments with monkey and human subjects. Building such "neuromorphic" devices is expected to greatly benefit the understanding of biological perception since the designer of a working and robust system has to overcome, and thus to understand, many of the same functional constraints biological systems are faced with (noise, limited connection possibilities etc). Also machine vision should benefit significantly from this work since technical image understanding systems will be confronted with the same problem of information overload as biological organisms are, once the still primitive stage of computer vision (compared to biological vision) will be surpassed. -- Ernst Niebur, PhD Krieger Mind/Brain Institute Asst. Prof. of Neuroscience Johns Hopkins University niebur@jhu.edu 3400 N. Charles Street (410)516-8643, -8640 (secr), -8648 (fax) Baltimore, MD 21218
