Abstract
Recording from single neurons in the visual cortex of rhesus monkeys trained to perform complex attention tasks has been a highly successful approach to investigate the influence of spatial and feature-based attention on sensory information processing. For object-based attention this has been much more difficult. The presentation will explain this difference and give examples of studies of the neural correlate of object-based attention. Because object-based attention is characterized by the spread of attention across multiple features of a given object the presentation will also address studies of feature-based attention involving more than one feature. The latter will demonstrate that feature-based attentional modulation in extrastriate cortex seems to be restricted to those features for which a given neuron is genuinely, rather than accidentally, tuned.
The data show a system of attentional modulation that combines spatial, feature-based and object-based attention and that seems designed to create an integrated saliency map where the perceptual strength of a given stimulus represents the combination of its sensory strength with the behavioral relevance the system attributes to it.