Biologically Based Top-Down Attention Modulation for Humanoid Interactions

An adaptive perception system enables humanoid robots to interact with humans and their surroundings in a meaningful context-dependent manner. An important foundation for visual perception is the selectivity of early vision processes that enables the system to filter out low-level unimportant information while attending to features indicated as important by higher-level processes by way of top-down modulation. We present a novel way to integrate top-down and bottom-up processing for achieving such attention-based filtering. We specifically consider the case where the top-down target is not the most salient in any of the used submodalities.