Our visual system consciously processes only a subset of the incoming information. Selective attention allows us to prioritize relevant inputs, and can be allocated to features, locations, and objects. Recent advances in feature-based attention suggest that several selection principles are shared across these domains and that many differences between the effects of attention on perceptual processing can be explained by differences in the underlying representational structures. Moving forward, it can thus be useful to assess how attention changes the structure of the representational spaces over which it operates, which include the spatial organization, feature maps, and object-based coding in visual cortex. This will ultimately add to our understanding of how attention changes the flow of visual information processing more broadly.

中文翻译：

---

表征结构作为注意力的统一框架

我们的视觉系统有意识地只处理传入信息的一个子集。选择性注意使我们能够优先考虑相关输入，并且可以分配给特征、位置和对象。基于特征的注意力的最新进展表明，这些领域共享一些选择原则，并且注意力对感知处理的影响之间的许多差异可以通过潜在表征结构的差异来解释。因此，展望未来，评估注意力如何改变其运作的表征空间的结构是有用的，其中包括视觉皮层中的空间组织、特征图和基于对象的编码。这最终将加深我们对注意力如何更广泛地改变视觉信息处理流程的理解。