Spatial attention improves the quality of population codes in human visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Selective attention enables sensory input from behaviorally relevant stimuli to be processed in greater detail, so that these stimuli can more accurately influence thoughts, actions, and future goals. Attention has been shown to modulate the spiking activity of single feature-selective neurons that encode basic stimulus properties (color, orientation, etc.). However, the combined output from many such neurons is required to form stable representations of relevant objects and little empirical work has formally investigated the relationship between attentional modulations on population responses and improvements in encoding precision. Here, we used functional MRI and voxel-based feature tuning functions to show that spatial attention induces a multiplicative scaling in orientation-selective

SUBMITTER: Saproo S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2934940 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature