Optometry Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Optometry, including details on myopia, optometric practice, therapy.

Neural mechanisms of visual attention: how top-down feedback highlights relevant locations.

Saalmann YB, Pigarev IN, Vidyasagar TR

Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.

Attention helps us process potentially important objects by selectively increasing the activity of sensory neurons that represent the relevant locations and features of our environment. This selection process requires top-down feedback about what is important in our environment. We investigated how parietal cortical output influences neural activity in early sensory areas. Neural recordings were made simultaneously from the posterior parietal cortex and an earlier area in the visual pathway, the medial temporal area, of macaques performing a visual matching task. When the monkey selectively attended to a location, the timing of activities in the two regions became synchronized, with the parietal cortex leading the medial temporal area. Parietal neurons may thus selectively increase activity in earlier sensory areas to enable focused spatial attention.

Published 15 June 2007 in Science, 316(5831): 1612-5.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Optometry Research Today. All Rights Reserved.