The Laboratory for Active and Attentive Vision (LAAV) has its roots in the original Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Toronto founded by John Tsotsos in 1980. In those years it was part of the Artificial Intelligence Group in the Department of Computer Science. There, Tsotsos also founded the Technical Report Series: Research in Biological and Computational Vision (1984 – 1996). In January 2000, Tsotsos moved to York University to take up the Directorship of the Centre for Vision Research and a portion of that lab followed him. The history of the current lab thus goes back to 1980 and includes a significant number of students, post-docs and publications from the pre-York era.

At York, the Laboratory for Active and Attentive Vision is situated within the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. It is also one of over 35 labs in the much larger Centre for Vision Research (cvr.yorku.ca). The lab has grown steadily over its history now bursting at the seams in rooms 3001 A, B and 3054 in the Lassonde building. With a rich set of international collaborators, and a well-equipped infrastructure the lab is an exciting research focus for interdisciplinary research on human and primate visual attention and active vision for robotics. Research is ongoing within four themes: Refinements and Expansions of the Selective Tuning Model (ST) for Visual Attention; Human Experimental Investigations on the relationship of ST To Biological Vision and Visually-Guided Robotics with application to Aids for the Physically Disabled.