Center for Mind and Brain

UC Davis Researchers Look at How the Brain Prioritizes What We See

How we focus our attention before we even see an object matters. For example, when we look for something moving in the sky, our expectation would be very different if the object is a bird flying past or a baseball coming straight at us.

But it’s unclear whether our brain’s attention focuses first on a broad characteristic of the anticipated object, such as movement, or a specific feature — such as the direction of movement up or down.