Research · Concept
How the eye decides what matters
Your eyes take in far more than your mind can process, so attention is the system that decides what gets through. For decades, the best theories each captured one piece of how it works: Posner's spotlight that can be aimed without moving the eyes; Eriksen's zoom-lens that trades width for resolution; Downing's smooth gradient of priority; Lavie's perceptual load, where spare capacity spills onto whatever's nearby; and the saliency maps of Itti, Koch and Niebur, which compute where the eye will land from raw image contrast.
Each theory is right about something. The question that pulls me in is whether they're describing five different mechanisms — or five views of a single underlying field.
That's the wager of my second research line, Attention as a Magnetic Field: one law from which gradient, load, and incidental processing all fall out. The companion to it is a training-free saliency model — no learning, just the physics — that still scores AUC 0.793 on the MIT/Tübingen benchmark.