Pre-attentive and attentive vision module

This paper introduces a new vision module, called PAAV, developed for the cognitive architecture ACT-R. Unlike ACT-R’s default vision module that was originally developed for top-down perception only, PAAV was designed to model a wide range of tasks, such as visual search and scene viewing, where pre-attentive bottom-up processes are essential for the validity of a model. PAAV builds on attentive components of the default vision module and incorporates greater support for modeling pre-attentive components of human vision. The module design incorporates the best practices from existing models of vision. The validity of the module was tested on four different tasks.