Competitive mechanisms subserve attention in macaque areas V2 and V4：（竞争机制促进V2和V4猕猴领域的关注）.pdfVIP

The Journal of Neuroscience, March 1, 1999, 19(5):1736–1753 Competitive Mechanisms Subserve Attention in Macaque Areas V2 and V4 John H. Reynolds,1 Leonardo Chelazzi,2 and Robert Desimone1 1Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-4415, and 2Dipartimento di Scienze Neurologiche e della Visione, Sezione di Fisiologia, University of Verona, Verona, Italy It is well established that attention modulates visual processing stimulus presented alone inside the receptive field or paired in extrastriate cortex. However, the underlying neural mecha- with a second receptive field stimulus, while the monkey at- nisms are unknown. A consistent observation is that attention tended to a location outside the receptive field. Adding the has its greatest impact on neuronal responses when multiple second stimulus typically caused the neuron’s response to stimuli appear together within a cell’s receptive field. One way move toward the response that was elicited by the second to explain this is to assume that multiple stimuli activate com- stimulus alone. Then, we directed the monkey’s attention to one peting populations of neurons and that attention biases this element of the pair. This drove the neuron’s response toward competition in favor of the attended stimulus. In the absence of the response elicited when the attended stimulus appeared competing stimuli, there is no competition to be resolved. alone. These findings are consistent with the idea that attention Accordingly, attention has a more limited effect on the neuronal biases competitive interaction