Modelling Attentional Biases in the Perception of Geometric Forms

Abstract

Attentional biases are observed in all modalities of human perception. For example, experimental participants respond more quickly to particular dimensions of stimuli and to stimuli located in particular positions of the visual and auditory fields. This paper reports robust top-right attentional bias in perception of simple geometric forms and an explanation of this bias in terms of our long experience at reading English text from left to right coupled with the need to adjust attention upwards as we locomote through visual space. Attempts to explain the attentional bias in terms of simple neural networks given training at recognising features scrolling from right to left and top to bottom in the visual field are reported.