Visual Attention and Cortical Circuits
Edited by:
- Jochen Braun,
- Christof Koch &
- Joel L. Davis
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001. $48 hardcover, pp 344 ISBN 0-26-202493-4 | ISBN: 0-26-202493-4
Our senses are typically bombarded with a vast amount of information that cannot all be processed simultaneously in the nervous system. Selective attention helps us to handle the processing of information from cluttered sensory environments by selecting relevant and by filtering out irrelevant stimuli. The importance of attentional mechanisms for our everyday life becomes immediately obvious when they fail, as in patients with attentional deficits, such as children suffering from ADHD. The study of attention is a major topic in many different disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, neurobiology and computational neuroscience, which use a variety of methodological approaches. Psychologists typically investigate the effects of attention by using behavioral performance measures. For example, selective attention to a spatial location improves the accuracy and speed of responses to stimuli that occur in that location. Physiologists study neural correlates of attention in different parts of the brain using single-cell recordings in monkeys or functional brain mapping in humans. One of the major findings has been that neural responses to an attended sensory stimulus are enhanced in sensory representation areas compared to the responses evoked by the same stimulus when unattended. Because of the different expertise and approaches of attention researchers, it has been proven difficult to derive a unified framework of selective attention that can account for the majority of empirical findings from psychology and neurobiology. A major goal of cognitive neuroscience is to bridge multiple disciplines by correlating behavioral and neural measures in order to develop an integrated theory of attention.
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