Covert Attention B-sides and Horace Barlow’s Neuron Doctrine

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Covert visual attention allows the brain to select specific regions of the visual world without eye movements. Attending to a location or object significantly improves perceptual performance. The reigning dogma and long-standing textbook explanation state that covert attention is a limited resource. According to this view, splitting attentional resources across locations comes at a cost, while focusing them at a single location improves processing. This dogma also posits that a specialized brain module, thought of as a spotlight or zoom, is needed to manifest attention-like behaviors. Eckstein will challenge this classic dogma by building on our lab’s eight-year+ dedication to unraveling how neural networks without any built-in attention mechanism show emergent human-like signatures of covert attention. Peeking under the hood of these networks helps us understand how a system can "attend" without explicitly building an attention mechanism and allows us to make predictions about the existence of new neuron-types mediating covert attention. Finally, Eckstein will reflect on the enduring relevance of Barlow’s neuron doctrine and the capability of simpler organisms and AI to exhibit the behavioral and neural signatures of human-like covert attention.

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