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scaffolding. When learning a task, it is difficult for a robotic system to learn what perceptual
aspects matter. This only gets worse as robots are expected to perform more complex tasks
in more complex environments. This challenging learning issue can be addressed in an
interesting way, however, if the robot learns the task with a human instructor who can
explicitly direct the robot’s attention to the salient aspects and who can determine from
the robot’s social cues whether or not the robot is attending to the relevant features. This
doesn’t solve the problem, but it could facilitate a solution in a new and interesting way that
is natural and intuitive for people.
In the big picture, low-level feature extraction and visual attention are components of
a larger visual system. I present how the attention system is integrated with other visual
behaviors in chapter 12.