Fig. 2: Experimental design and behavioral performance.

a Example trial of the attentive motion discrimination task depicting critical task events. Top row shows display elements of the task; note that they are not drawn in scale (see Methods). Bottom row show an example eye trace corresponding to the trial on top: subjects were required to keep fixation until the prolonged motion event occurred (see also methods); black and gray solid traces represent x and y axes, respectively; dashed lines mark critical task events; blue lines show the tolerance window for eye movements (±1 deg. visual angle); spikes in the eye traces correspond to eye blinks and were not considered as breaks in fixation. b Schematic of the block design adopted during scanning. The experiment included three types of block: ‘Attend left’ and ‘Attend right’ where the task described in A was preformed; ‘Passive Fixation’ blocks where the trial structure was exactly the same as in the attention trials, but no attentional cue was displayed. Subjects alternated between paying attention to the right, passive fixation, and paying attention to the left. During the “right” and “left” blocks, subjects had to detect and discriminate a motion event at the cued location, while ignoring similar visual stimulation at the irrelevant location. During passive fixation blocks, the trial structure was the same as the attention blocks, but subjects were required to passively fixate the central spot while the moving stimuli were displayed. See also Methods. c Behavioral performance of human subjects. In each trial, of the 8 possible motion directions, one was chosen for the target, and a different one was chosen for the distractor. This resulted in five main behavioral outcomes: the subject could saccade into the motion direction displayed by the target (“hit”) or the direction of the distracter (“selection error”) or to 1 of 6 remaining targets (“discrimination error”); the subject could fail to respond to the prolonged event (“missed detection”) or respond before the prolonged event actually occurred (“early selection”). Data are expressed as mean across 12 subjects; gray points represent the values for each individual subject. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.