Attentional Control of Visual Perception: Cortical and Subcortical Mechanisms
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Given the properties of muscles (and the laws of physics), it is obviously not possible to direct the eyes or move an arm to more than one object at a time. What may not be so obvious is that neither is it possible to fully process or store in memory more than one or two visual stimuli in a single moment. In this sense, memory and muscles are very much alike. Thus, neurobiologists working in both sensory and motor systems must confront the problem of selective attention, i.e., how the brain selects which of the many images typically stimulating the retina will be the target for an eye movement or will have access to memory at a given moment. It is an interesting question whether these attentional mechanisms are the same mechanisms for both sensory and motor systems, and we address this later in this paper.
In our work, we...
