Attention as selection-for-action: a scheme for active perception

Abstract

Proposes three principles for attentional control of actions in autonomous robots. (1) Attention-as-action suggests that attentional shifts and the selection of the focus of attention should be seen as actions rather than as a purely sensory process. (2) Selection-for-action suggests that actions should be implicitly controlled by the current focus of attention. (3) Deictic reference is a method of referring to an external object without explicitly representing all of its properties. The three principles are illustrated in two examples: first for a mobile robot, and second for a visually controlled manipulator. In the second example, we also report two learning experiments where a robot picks out the correct focus of attention for a task based on reinforcement learning.