Increased Activity in Human Visual Cortex during Directed Attention in the Absence of Visual Stimulation

@article{Kastner1999IncreasedAI,
  title={Increased Activity in Human Visual Cortex during Directed Attention in the Absence of Visual Stimulation},
  author={Sabine Kastner and Mark A. Pinsk and Peter de Weerd and Robert Desimone and Leslie G. Ungerleider},
  journal={Neuron},
  year={1999},
  volume={22},
  pages={751-761}
}
View on Elsevier
cell.com
1,547 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
138
Background Citations
725
Methods Citations
74
Results Citations
142

Figures and Tables from this paper

1,547 Citations

Mechanisms of feature- and space-based attention: response modulation and baseline increases.
TLDR
Functional magnetic resonance imaging findings provide evidence that baseline increases in visual cortex during cue periods do not reflect the activation of a memory template that includes particular stimulus properties of the expected target, but rather carry information about the location of an expected target stimulus.
Neural correlates of sustained spatial attention in human early visual cortex.
TLDR
It is demonstrated that sustained attention responses are present in early visual cortex (including primary visual cortex), in the absence of a visual stimulus, and that these responses correlate with the allocation of visuospatial attention in both the spatial and temporal domains.
Transient Attention Enhances Perceptual Performance and fMRI Response in Human Visual Cortex
Directing attention to a location in space results in retinotopic activation in primary visual cortex
Activity in the Visual Cortex is Modulated by Top-Down Attention Locked to Reaction Time
TLDR
Control experiments are compatible with the hypothesis that the nonsensory hemodynamic signal is mediated by top-down spatial attention, linked to (but separate from) awareness of the change.
Independence of anticipatory signals for spatial attention from number of nontarget stimuli in the visual field.
TLDR
The topography of spatial attention-related anticipatory BOLD signal modulation across visual cortex, specifically decrements at unattended locations, is mainly determined by processes at the cued location and not by the number or behavioral relevance of distant low-contrast nontarget stimuli elsewhere in the visual field.
On the Role of Suppression in Spatial Attention: Evidence from Negative BOLD in Human Subcortical and Cortical Structures
There is clear evidence that spatial attention increases neural responses to attended stimuli in extrastriate visual areas and, to a lesser degree, in earlier visual areas. Other evidence shows that…
Preparatory activity in visual cortex indexes distractor suppression during covert spatial orienting.
TLDR
Functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed increased cue-evoked activity in retinotopically specific regions of visual cortex when increased distractor suppression was elicited by a high probability of distractors.
Preparatory Effects of Distractor Suppression: Evidence from Visual Cortex
TLDR
This study shows that prior knowledge concerning the presence of a distractor results in enhanced attentional modulation of visual cortex, in visual areas where neuronal receptive fields are large enough to encompass both targets and distractors.
Activity in primary visual cortex predicts performance in a visual detection task
TLDR
Activity in early visual cortex quantitatively predicted the subject's pattern-detection performance: when activity was greater, the subject was more likely to correctly discern the presence or absence of the pattern.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 104 REFERENCES
Attentional modulation of visual motion processing in cortical areas MT and MST
TLDR
It is reported that the responses of direction-selective neurons in monkey visual cortex are greatly influenced by attention, and that this modulation occurs as early in the cortical hierarchy as the level of the middle temporal visual area (MT).
Visual attention mediated by biased competition in extrastriate visual cortex.
  • R. Desimone
  • Biology, Psychology
    Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
  • 1998
TLDR
Any enhancing effect of attention is best understood in the context of competitive interactions among neurons representing all of the stimuli present in the visual field, which can be biased in favour of behaviourally relevant stimuli as a result of many different processes.
Behavioral enhancement of visual responses in monkey cerebral cortex. I. Modulation in posterior parietal cortex related to selective visual attention.
TLDR
It is suggested that the role of area 7 in visual attention may be mediated by the enhancement of visual responses to selected stimuli, which resembles the psychological phenomenon of selective spatial attention.
Mechanisms of directed attention in the human extrastriate cortex as revealed by functional MRI.
TLDR
Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans showed that when multiple stimuli are present simultaneously in the visual field, their cortical representations within the object recognition pathway interact in a competitive, suppressive fashion.
Visual, presaccadic, and cognitive activation of single neurons in monkey lateral intraparietal area.
TLDR
The results from several tasks indicate that LIP neurons are activated in a variety of circumstances and are not involved exclusively in sensory processing or motor planning, and the modulation of sensory responses by attention and anticipation suggests that cognitive factors play a major role in parietal function.
Two Modulatory Effects of Attention That Mediate Object Categorization in Human Cortex
TLDR
Attentional modulation of cortical activity was examined by varying the rate of visual stimuli in object categorization tasks according to single and conjoined features and several cortical regions showed attentionally modulated activity.
The Retinotopy of Visual Spatial Attention
Enhancement of visual responses in monkey striate cortex and frontal eye fields.
TLDR
The different characteristics of the enhancement instriate cortex and the observation of enhancement in the colliculus following ablation of striate cortex suggest that this cortical area is an unlikely source of the collicular enhancement.
Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention.
  • G. Mangun
  • Psychology, Biology
    Psychophysiology
  • 1995
TLDR
The physiological evidence extends early selection theories by providing neurophysiologically precise information about the stages of visual processing affected by attention and provides physiological evidence for early precategorical selection during visual attention.
The functional anatomy of attention to visual motion. A functional MRI study.
Attention can enhance or modulate neural responses to stimuli at early and late stages of sensory processing. We were interested in the modulatory effect of attention to visual motion on cortical…
...
...