In Search of a Trade Mark: Search Practices and Bureaucratic Poetics

Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself

Selective Tuning: Feature Binding Through Selective Attention

Abstract. We present a biologically plausible computational model for solving the visual binding problem. The binding problem appears due to the distributed nature of visual processing in the primate brain, and the gradual loss of spatial information along the processing hierarchy. The model relies on the reentrant connections so ubiquitous in the primate brain to recover spatial information, and thus allow features represented in different parts of the brain to be integrated in a unitary conscious percept. We demonstrate the ability of the Selective Tuning (ST) model of visual attention [1] to recover spatial information, and based on this propose a general solution to the binding problem. The solution is demonstrated on two classic problems: recovery of form from motion and binding of shape and color. We also demonstrate how the method is able to handle difficult situations such as occlusions and transparency. The model is discussed in relation to recent results regarding the time course and processing sequence for form-from-motion in the primate visual system.

Towards a biologically plausible active visual search model, in

This paper proposes a neuronal-based solution to active visual search, that is, visual search for a given target in displays that are too large in spatial extent to be inspected covertly. Recent experimental data from behaving, fixating monkeys is used as a guide and this is the first model to incorporate such data. The strategy presented here includes novel components such as a representation of saccade history and of peripheral targets that is computed in an entirely separate stream from foveal attention. Although this presentation describes the prototype of this model and much work remains, preliminary results obtained from its implementation seem consistent with the behaviour exhibited in humans and macaque monkeys. 1

Attentional Modulation and Selection – An Integrated Approach

<div><p>Various models of the neural mechanisms of attentional modulation in the visual cortex have been proposed. In general, these models assume that an ‘attention’ parameter is provided separately. Its value as well as the selection of neuron(s) to which it applies are assumed, but its source and the selection mechanism are unspecified. Here we show how the Selective Tuning model of visual attention can account for the modulation of the firing rate at the single neuron level, and for the temporal pattern of attentional modulations in the visual cortex, in a self-contained formulation that simultaneously determines the stimulus elements to be attended while modulating the relevant neural processes.</p></div