Two separate lines of study have clarified the role of selectivity in conscious access to visual information. Both involve presenting multiple targets and distracters: one "simultaneously" in a spatially distributed fashion, the other "sequentially" at a single location. To understand their findings in a unified framework, we propose a…

We present the case for a role of biologically plausible neural network modeling in bridging the gap between physiology and behavior. We argue that spiking-level networks can allow "vertical" translation between physiological properties of neural systems and emergent "whole-system" performance--enabling psychological results to be simulated from…

Although in traditional attention research the focus of visual spatial attention has been considered as indivisible, many studies in the last 15 years have claimed the contrary. These studies suggest that humans can direct their attention simultaneously to multiple noncontiguous regions of the visual field upon mere instruction. The notion that…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the mechanisms of brain activity, as revealed by a combination of the visuospatial attention shifting paradigm and event-related potentials (ERP) in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing children. Twenty-eight DCD children and 26 typically…

The report presents both a way of looking at perceptual mechanisms in nervous systems in terms of distributed information processing, and a way of creating computer models of parts of nervous systems. The first notion views a nervous system as a collection of interacting parallel-operating computation units, each of which has some part of the…

This paper reviews the aspects of cognitive science that relate best to using electrical and magnetic recording to understand the function of brain systems. It outlines a framework for relating cognitive activities of daily life (typing, reading) to underlying neural systems. The framework uses five levels of analysis: task, elementary operations,…

Reviews research done on the nature of vision from a neurologic perspective. Proposes a multiplex filter model to explain patterns in the signals transmitted to the brain from the retina. Describes experiments done to test the model. (CW)