Sensing Strategies and Attentional Mechanisms

Perception

Perception refers to the extraction of knowledge (usually in the form of signals) from the environment. One characteristic of perception is that it may integrate sensory information from different modalities. For example, in humans the modalities of perception correspond to the five senses: taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell.

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. 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

This is 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 visial 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 which employ some sensing strategy:

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