Human cortical mechanisms of visual attention during orienting and search

Abstract

Functional anatomical studies indicate that a set of neural signals in parietal and frontal cortex mediates the covert allocation of attention to visual locations across a wide variety of visual tasks. This fronto–parietal network includes areas, such as the frontal eye field and supplementary eye field. This anatomical overlap suggests that shifts of attention to visual locations or objects recruit areas involved in oculomotor programming and execution. Finally, the fronto–parietal network may be the source of spatial attentional modulations in the ventral visual system during object recognition or discrimination.