Authors:

Chelazzi, L., DUNCAN, J., Miller, E.K., & Desimone, R.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1998

CBU number:

3754

Abstract:

A typical scene will contain many different objects, few of which are relevant to behaviour at any given moment. Thus attentional mechanisms are needed to select relevant objects for visual processing and control over behaviour. We examined this role of attention in the inferior temporal cortex of macaque monkeys, using a visual search paradigm. While the monkey maintained fixation, a cue stimulus was presented at the center of gaze, followed by a blank delay period. After the delay, an array of two to five choice stimuli was presented extrafoveally, and the monkey was rewarded for detecting a target stimulus matching the cue. The behavioural response was a saccadic eye movement to the target in one version of the task and a lever release in another. The array was composed of one “good” stimulus (effective in driving the cell when presented alone) and one more “poor” stimuli (ineffective in driving the cell when presented alone). Most cells showed higher delay activity after a good stimulus used as the cue than after a poor stimulus. The baseline activity of cells was also higher preceeding a good cue, if the animal expected it to occur. this activity may depend on top-down bias in favour of cells coding the relevant stimulus. When the choice array was presented, most cells showed suppressive interactions between the stimuli as well as strong attention affects. When the choice array was presented in the contralateral visual field, most cells initially responded the same, regardless of which stimulus was the target. However, within 150-200 ms of array onset, responses were determined by the target stimulus. If the target was the good stimulus, the response to the array became equal to the response to the good stimulus presented alone. If the target was a poor stimulus, the response approached the response to that stimulus alone. Thus the influence of the non-target influence was eliminated. These effects occured well in advance of behavioural response. When the array was positioned with stimuli on opposite sides of the vertical meridian, the contralateral stimulus appeared to dominate the response, and this dominant effect could not be overcome by attention. Overall, the results support a “biased competition” model of attention, according to which 1) objects in the visual field compete for representation in the cortex, and 2) this competition is biased in favour of the behaviourally relevant object of “top-down” feedback from structures involved in working memory.