Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST.

ABSTRACT: Visual attention modulates the firing rate of neurons in many primate cortical areas. In V4, a cortical area in the ventral visual pathway, spatial attention has also been shown to reduce the tendency of neurons to fire closely separated spikes (burstiness). A recent model proposes that a single mechanism accounts for both the firing rate enhancement and the burstiness reduction in V4, but this has not been empirically tested. It is also unclear if the burstiness reduction by spatial attention is found in other visual areas and for other attentional types. We therefore recorded from single neurons in the medial superior temporal area (MST), a key motion-processing area along the dorsal visual pathway, of two rhesus monkeys while they performed a task engaging both spatial and feature-based

SUBMITTER: Xue C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5939203 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature