Forms of Selective Attention in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Description

Selective attention is the capability exhibited by humans for selecting the relevant portions of information from the environment. It is thought to be necessary because there are too many things in the environment to perceive and respond to at once. This is the case of urban scenarios, in which the increase of the number of ubiquitous information devices such as smartphones might lead to the problem of charging humans with the superabundance of the information those devices collect about the agents - mostly human beings - and their surrounding elements - transportation systems, buildings, weather, etc., that populate those environments. Although humans exhibit natural selective mechanisms, this does not prevent them from being interrupted from whatever they are doing to deal with the information provided by those devices. This is critical when those interruptions are dangerous as happens when humans are driving and are interrupted continuously by those devices many times with irrelevant information for the task they are carrying out. Providing those devices with an artificial selective attention mechanism that selects and communicates to the human user only the relevant information might be a solution of primary importance. The goal of this project is to build such artificial attention mechanism for those personal devices so that they select and communicate to their human holders only traveller information that is relevant for them, preventing those human agents from a superabundance of information and unnecessary interruptions. Our approach relies on the results of psychological and neuroscience studies about selective attention. We propose a computational model of selective attention that relies on the assumption that uncertain, surprising and motive congruent/incongruent information demands attention from an intelligent agent, i.e., that only cognitively and affectively, interesting/relevant information is selected and forwarded to reasoning/decision-making units.

Researchers

Funded by

FCT

Total budget

65 252,00 €

Keywords

Selective Attention, Information Triage, Alerting, Emotion, Transportation Systems

Start Date

2010-05-01

End Date

2013-10-31

Conference Articles

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