Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive
Science
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Cognitive Science 200: Visual
salience: neurophysiology and models
(Section ID: 659727)
Friday afternoons, CSB 003
Student discussion session: 2-2:50PM
Public lecture: 3-4:50
Organizers: Gary Cottrell, Javier Movellan, and Mike Mozer
Fall 2009
To join the cs200 mailing list to receive
announcements
of talks, see this
instruction page. Cognitive Science 200 is an
interdisciplinary seminar of
changing topics, and is used as a mechanism for
Ph.D. students in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program and in
the Cognitive Science Department to achieve breadth.
This quarter, the topic is "Visual Salience: neurophysiology and
models."
As a result of having a foveated retina, we actively move our eyes to
direct our highest resolution of visual processing towards interesting
things. In fact, we move our eyes about three times a second; it is a
decision we make about 172,000 times a day, more than any other in our
lives! How do we decide where to look? Where we look has two major
influences: 1) exogenous or "bottom-up" influences - "busy-ness" of
some sort in our visual field, such as motion or areas of high
contrast, and 2) endogenous or "top-down" influences, i.e., our current
goals or task. This quarter, COGS 200 will continue a
conversation/debate that has been going on among several researchers in
the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (tdlc.ucsd.edu) with somewhat
distinct models of visual salience. We have also invited researchers
with expertise in the neurophysiology of the representation of
"attention" or "salience" in the brain. Students in the course will be
required to read papers and to write a paper at the end of the quarter.
The room for Cogsci 200 is Cognitive Science Building
003. The meeting times are Fridays 2-2:50PM for registered
students, and 3:00-4:50PM for the lectures (to which the
UCSD Cognitive Science community is invited). This will be
followed usually by the cognitive science happy hour in the
cog sci building courtyard.
The graduate student section from 2-2:50 will involve the
professor using the dreaded index card method: students will
be asked questions about the papers that are intended to
generate some discussion and understanding of the
material. Students are therefore expected to have done the
reading before class. The method involves index cards with
every student's name on them. These are shuffled at the
beginning of class, and then students are asked questions in
order of their appearance on the card. The first question is
almost always, "What is the point of this paper?", and is
often asked several times until we converge on one or more
main themes of the paper.
The requirements for the class are: 1) reading
the assigned papers; 2) being able to answer questions about
them in discussion section; 3) asking the speaker a question
about 20% of the time (I'll be keeping track! I.e., you need to ask 2
questions all quarter) and 4) writing an
approximately 10 page research proposal that is of your own
choosing - it could be an extension to one of the topics
covered in the lectures, tesing a hypothesis about salience or
attention, pitting the various models against one another, etc.
It should be specific enough that there
are clear criteria for success or failure.
The draft of this is due in the 8th week, the final version
is due on the Monday of finals week.
| DATE |
PRESENTER |
TITLE |
PAPER
|
DISCUSSION
PAGE
|
SLIDES |
September 25
|
Gary Cottrell
|
Organizational meeting
|
|
|
|
October 2
|
Donald Hagler, UCSD
|
Overview of neural mechanisms of
salience and attention
|
A.
Martınez et al. (2001) Putting spatial attention on the map: timing and
localization of stimulus selection processes in striate and
extrastriate visual areas Vision
Research 41:1437–1457
Grent-‘t-Jong,
T & Woldorff, M.G. (2007) Timing and Sequence of Brain Activity in
Top-Down Control of Visual-Spatial Attention. PLOS Biology 5(1):114-126
|
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
October 9
|
Lingyun Zhang (tentative)
|
SUN: A Bayesian framework for
Saliency Using Natural statistics
|
Zhang,
Lingyun, Tong, Matthew H., Marks, Tim K., Shan, Honghao, and Cottrell,
Garrison W. (2008). SUN: A Bayesian Framework for Saliency Using
Natural Statistics. Journal of Vision 8(7):32, 1-20.
Zhang,
L., Tong, M., and Cottrell, G.W. (2009) SUNDAy: Saliency Using Natural
Statistics for Dynamic Analysis of Scenes. In Proceedings of the 31st
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
|
Discuss Zhang
paper(s)
|
|
October 16
|
Michael Mozer
(CU Boulder)
|
Experience-guided search: A
theory of attentional control.
|
Mozer,
M. C., & Baldwin, D. S. (2008). Experience-guided search: A theory
of attentional control. In J. Platt, D. Koller, & Y. Singer (Eds.),
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 (pp. 1033-1040).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Wolfe,
J. M. (2007). Guided Search 4.0: Current Progress with a model of
visual search. In W. Gray (Ed.), Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems
(pp. 99-119). New York: Oxford.
|
Discuss any paper
here...
|
|
October 23
|
Chris Kanan
|
Top-down SUN.
|
Kanan,
C.M., Tong, M.H., Zhang, L. and Cottrell, G.W. (2009). SUN: Top-down
saliency using natural statistics. Visual Cognition 17, Issue 6 & 7
pp. 979-1003 (Special Issue on eye guidance in natural scenes (B.
Tatler, Ed.)).
A. Torralba, A.
Oliva, M. Castelhano and J. M. Henderson (2006) Contextual Guidance of
Attention in Natural scenes: The role of Global features on object
search. Psychological Review 113(4):766-786 |
Discuss any paper
here...
|
|
October 30
|
Matt Wilder
|
A Unified Theory of Attentional
Control
|
Matthew H. Wilder, Michael C.
Mozer and Christopher D. Wickens (draft) A
Unified Theory of Attentional Control |
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
November 6
|
Randy O’Reilly (CU Boulder)
|
Attention without an attentional
mechanism
|
Chapter
8 of CCNC (read 8.5 and 8.6)
Cohen et al. 1994
|
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
November 13
|
Nick Butko (UCSD)
|
Infomax Control: Closing the
Perception-Action Loop
|
1. Najemik,
Jiri & Geisler, Wilson S. (2005) Optimal eye movement
strategies
in
visual search Nature 434:387-391.
1.a (OPTIONAL) Online supplementary material
for Najemik, Jiri & Geisler, Wilson S. (2005) Optimal
eye movement strategies in visual search
2. Nick Butko and Javier Movellan
(2008) I-POMDP: An Infomax Model of Eye Movement In Proceedings of the 2008 International
Conference on Development and Learning.
|
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
November 20
|
Laurent Itti (USC)
|
Computational modeling of
surprise and combined bottom-up/top-down gaze control
|
Itti, Laurent, and Baldi, Pierre
(2009) Bayesian surprise attracts human attention. Vision Research
49:1295–1306
R. J. Peters, L. Itti (2007) Congruence
between model and human attention reveals unique signatures of critical
visual events, In: Advances in Neural Information Processing
Systems, Vol. 20 (NIPS*2007), pp. 1145-1152, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
|
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
December 4
|
Angela Yu (UCSD)
|
TBA
|
|
Discuss any paper
here... |
|
The instructor is Professor
Gary Cottrell, whose office is CSE Building room 4130.
Feel free to send email to
arrange
an appointment, or telephone (858) 534-6640.
REGISTRATION
Students may take the seminar only for four units of S/U credit.
Students should register for COGS 200, section id 659727.
If you must have a letter
grade (because of your departmental requirements), please see me and
let me know!
Most recently updated on September 29, 2009 by Gary Cottrell, gary@ucsd.edu