The role of prefrontal cortex in the control of feature attention in area V4
Name
s41467-019-13761-7.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.01 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
38c25565b3512d98dba916045fa3ce34
Author(s)
Bichot, Narcisse P
Xu, Rui
Ghadooshahy, Azriel
Williams, Michael L
Desimone, Robert
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019, The Author(s). When searching for an object in a cluttered scene, we can use our memory of the target object features to guide our search, and the responses of neurons in multiple cortical visual areas are enhanced when their receptive field contains a stimulus sharing target object features. Here we tested the role of the ventral prearcuate region (VPA) of prefrontal cortex in the control of feature attention in cortical visual area V4. VPA was unilaterally inactivated in monkeys performing a free-viewing visual search for a target stimulus in an array of stimuli, impairing monkeys’ ability to find the target in the array in the affected hemifield, but leaving intact their ability to make saccades to targets presented alone. Simultaneous recordings in V4 revealed that the effects of feature attention on V4 responses were eliminated or greatly reduced while leaving the effects of spatial attention on responses intact. Altogether, the results suggest that feedback from VPA modulates processing in visual cortex during attention to object features.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-019-13761-7
