Ran Carmi

Attention, Movie Cuts, and Natural Vision: a Functional Perspective Ran Carmi

Paying attention to the right thing at the right time underlies the ability of humans and other animals to learn, perceive, and interact with their environment. The attention system enables biological organisms to extract the most pertinent information from the barrage of sensory inputs that they experience in the real world. The goal of the computational and behavioral research described in this dissertation is to elucidate how attention works during natural vision. A functional understanding of the attention system would help build more intelligent machines that could behave autonomously in real world environments. Such understanding could also lead to better diagnostic tools and treatments for medical conditions that involve attention deficits, such as Autism, ADHD, and Parkinson Disease.