VISUAL PROCESSING IN CEREBRAL CORTEX

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Attention to particular stimuli greatly improves performance that depends on those stimuli, while degrading performance on other stimuli. Neurophysiological studies have shown that attention changes the responses of neurons in visual cerebral cortex, but many questions remain about the neuronal mechanisms through which attention alters behavior. The proposed experiments will address two specific questions about how spatial attention affects visual processing in the visual cortex of monkeys. The first specific aim will examine how attention affects the responses of individual neurons in visual cortex. Many studies have shown that attending to a stimulus enhances the responses of neurons that represent that stimulus, but few have examined the form of this enhancement. Recent results show that attention alters this link for some neurons, but leave open the possibility that a close relationship between neuronal and behavioral performance persists across attentional states for those neurons that are best suited for current task. The second specific aim will test this possibility by examining how attention affects the relationship between neuronal and behavioral performance for neurons during the performance of different visual tasks. The results from these experiments will greatly extend our understanding of how attention changes visual representations in cerebral cortex and improves behavioral performance, and will provide new insight about how individual neurons contribute to visual behaviors.