Attentional guidance and priority maps

A central characteristic of our perceptual system is its limited capacity. At any given moment, only a small subset of the information encoded by our senses reaches our conscious awareness, while the rest dissolves in an indistinct background. Likewise, we can typically direct our motor actions to only one or very few objects. It is therefore unsurprising that a central endeavor in psychological research is to uncover the mechanisms, collectively referred to as selective attention, that lead us to prioritize some stimuli at the expense of others. To think about selective attention, many researchers have found it useful to refer to a “priority map.” In a nutshell, a priority map is a dynamic spatial representation that ranks locations of the visual field by order of their importance for the organism. Since the 1980s, this concept has been at the heart of most attention models.