[Source:  Science Daily]
Ever wonder how the human brain, which is constantly bombarded with millions of pieces of visual information, can filter out what’s unimportant and focus on what’s most useful?
The process is known as selective attention and scientists have long debated how it works. But now, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have discovered an important clue. Evidence from an animal study, published in the July 22 online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that the prefrontal cortex is involved in a previously unknown way.
Two types of attention are utilized in the selective attention process — bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attention is automatically guided to images that stand out from a background by virtue of color, shape or motion, such as a billboard on a highway. Top-down attention occurs when one’s focus is consciously shifted to look for a known target in a visual scene, as when searching for a relative in a crowd.
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