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Involvement of striate and extrastriate visual cortical areas in spatial attention

Abstract

We investigated the cortical mechanisms of visual-spatial attention while subjects discriminated patterned targets within distractor arrays. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to map the boundaries of retinotopic visual areas and to localize attention-related changes in neural activity within several of those areas, including primary visual (striate) cortex. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and modeling of their neural sources, however, indicated that the initial sensory input to striate cortex at 50–55 milliseconds after the stimulus was not modulated by attention. The earliest facilitation of attended signals was observed in extrastriate visual areas, at 70–75 milliseconds. We hypothesize that the striate cortex modulation found with fMRI may represent a delayed, re-entrant feedback from higher visual areas or a sustained biasing of striate cortical neurons during attention. ERP recordings provide critical temporal information for analyzing the functional neuroanatomy of visual attention.

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Figure 1: Experimental design and attention–related activations.
Figure 2: Retinotopically mapped visual areas and co-localized attentional activations.
Figure 3: Grand-averaged ERP waveforms and scalp topographies.
Figure 4: Dipole modeling of cortical sources of ERPs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Matt Marlow, Cecelia Kemper and Carlos Nava for technical assistance. Supported by grants from NIMH (MH25594), ONR (N00014-93-0942), NIH (NS36722), HMRI, and from the Deutsch Forschungsgemeinschaft (HE 1531/3).

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Correspondence to S. A. Hillyard.

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Martínez, A., Anllo-Vento, L., Sereno, M. et al. Involvement of striate and extrastriate visual cortical areas in spatial attention. Nat Neurosci 2, 364–369 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/7274

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