Selective Attention Gates Visual Processing in the Extrastriate Cortex

The filtering of irrelevant information from the receptive fields of extrastriate neurons may underlie the ability to identify and remember the properties of a particular object out of the many that may be represented on the retina.

Abstract

Single cells were recorded in the visual cortex of monkeys trained to attend to stimuli at one location in the visual field and ignore stimuli at another. When both locations were within the receptive field of a cell in prestriate area V4 or the inferior temporal cortex, the response to the unattended stimulus was dramatically reduced. Cells in the striate cortex were unaffected by attention. The filtering of irrelevant information from the receptive fields of extrastriate neurons may underlie the ability to identify and remember the properties of a particular object out of the many that may be represented on the retina.