Sensing Strategies and Attention
Attentional Mechanisms
In general and especially in
dynamic environments, there
is information overload such that
the amount of
perceptual information
to be processed is greater than the
computational capability of the agent. One way to avoid this overload
is to filter out parts of the perceptual field and pay particular
attention to others; this is known as an attentional mechanism.
Eager versus Lazy Sensing
One type of attention is known as eager and lazy sensing. Some percepts
are sensed eagerly (updated as often as possible or at a constant rate)
while others are sensed only when there are resources available to
make the perception or the particular percept is known to be needed.
Thus, attention is placed on the eagerly sensed
percepts. This constitutes a biased attentional mechanism in
which the
focus of attention
is embedded in the architecture.
Distraction
The above represents
only one example of many types of attentional mechanisms: others
include attending to specific modalities or specific information
within a modality (e.g., movement in a visual field). One disadvantage
of attentional mechanisms is that they may lead to distraction.
Percepts with low attention may actually represent more important
information than the percepts with higher attention. The less
important percept is distracting the agent from the more important
one. In general, different
situations require different attentions and there is a constant flux
between the appropriate place to center attention.
Distraction is sometimes thought of as a feature of a
cognitive architecture that models human distraction. When the feature
is presented as such a model, the testing performed
on the agent must analyze how distraction of the agent is similar to
how humans are distracted, not simply that the agent
can be distracted models the fact that humans can be
distracted.
Architectures having this agent property include:
Go to the List of Common Agent Properties.
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