Neuronal Basis of Covert Spatial Attention in the Frontal Eye Field

By K. Thompson, Keri L Biscoe, Takashi R Sato. 2005

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The influential “premotor theory of attention” proposes that developing oculomotor commands mediate covert visual spatial attention. A likely source of this attentional bias is the frontal eye field (FEF), an area of the frontal cortex involved in converting visual information into saccade commands. We investigated the link between FEF activity and covert spatial attention by recording from FEF visual and saccade-related neurons in monkeys performing covert visual search tasks without eye movements. Here we show that the source of attention signals in the FEF is enhanced activity of visually responsive neurons. At the time attention is allocated to the visual search target, nonvisually responsive saccade-related movement neurons are inhibited. Therefore, in the FEF, spatial attention signals are independent of explicit saccade command signals. We propose that spatially selective activity in FEF visually responsive neurons corresponds to the mental spotlight of attention via modulation of ongoing visual processing.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Toward enhanced P300 speller performance. (2008, positive): “Covert visuospatial attention has been shown to modulate neuronal activity (Thompson et al., 2005) and ERP components (Nobre et al.”
Attention, learning and the value of information (2012, background): “These neural responses are in some respect not surprising because the capacity for covert attention has been well-established in psychophysical research, and its correlates are found also in the frontal eye ﬁeld (Schall et al., 2011; Thompson et al., 2005).”
Fundamental components of attention. (2007, background): “Single-unit recordings in the FEF indicate that the neurons that encode top-down bias signals are different from the neurons that exclusively encode eye saccades (Thompson et al. 2005).”
The Attention System of the Human Brain: 20 Years After (2012, background): “When the cue that indicates the target’s location is subtracted from an alerting cue, the difference represents effects of orienting.”
Functional Specialization in the Attention Network (2019, background): “Only those neurons with a visual-sensory response (i.e., visual and visual-movement neurons) show attention-related changes in spiking activity (Fiebelkorn et al. 2018, 2019; Gregoriou et al. 2012; Thompson et al. 2005).”