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Attention increases neural selectivity in the human lateral occipital complex

Nature Neuroscience volume 7, pages 70–74 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

It is well established that attention increases the efficiency of information processing, but the neural mechanisms underlying this improvement are not fully understood. Evidence indicates that neural firing rates increase for attended stimuli, but another possibility is that attention could increase the selectivity of the neural population representing an attended stimulus. We tested this latter hypothesis by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure population selectivity for object views under different attention conditions in the human lateral occipital complex (LOC). Our data not only show increased neural activity (or 'gain') with attention, consistent with existing models, but also increased population selectivity that cannot be accounted for by gain mechanisms alone. Our results suggest that attention increases the specificity of the neural population representing an attended object.

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Figure 1: Region of interest.
Figure 2: Schematic of the event-related design.
Figure 3: LOC results for experiment 1.
Figure 4: Adaptation model.
Figure 5: LOC results for experiment 2.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Kersten, B. Olshausen, M. Usrey, D. Woods, C. Petkov and C. Ranganath for comments on earlier versions, and N. Kanwisher for many helpful suggestions and discussions.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Scott O Murray

    Present address: Psychology Department, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Scott O Murray & Ewa Wojciulik

  2. Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Ewa Wojciulik

Authors
  1. Scott O Murray
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  2. Ewa Wojciulik
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Scott O Murray.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Examples of all of the 40 object shapes used in Experiments 1 and 2. Actual image files and software used to present them are available for download at www.neurobs.com. (PDF 235 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

Percent signal change in the left and right LOC. No differences were observed between the two hemispheres in the magnitude effect, the rotation-dependent responses, or the task by rotation interaction. (PDF 66 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 3

V1/V2 results for Experiment 1. No significant main effects or interactions were observed. (PDF 50 kb)

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Murray, S., Wojciulik, E. Attention increases neural selectivity in the human lateral occipital complex. Nat Neurosci 7, 70–74 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1161

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