Multimodal, Multilevel Selective Attention

Abstract

Early knowledge based systems did not incorporate high-bandwidth I/O due to performance limitations of computers of that era. Today, intelligent agents and robots running on much more powerful computers can incorporate vision, sound, network, sonar and other modes of input. These additional inputs provide much more information about the environment, but bring ad-ditional problems related to control of perception. Perceptual input streams (called modes in the psy-chology literature) can have greatly varying bandwidth. In people, the sense of touch has a low bandwidth, while the sense of vision has a very high bandwidth. The hu-man brain can not completely process all of the informa-tion from one high bandwidth mode, much less simul-taneously process all the information available from all