Paying Attention to the Cortical Layers

Paying Attention to the Cortical Layers

In this issue of Neuron, Nandy et al. (2017) reveal a number of important new insights into the neural mechanisms that are responsible for attentional selection.

Paying Attention to the Details of Attention

Attention selects behaviorally relevant stimuli for greater neural representation. In this issue of Neuron, Luo and Maunsell (2015) show that attention acts, in part, by boosting the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of sensory neurons.

Paying Attention to Memory

Paying attention to meaning.

Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at d...

Paying Attention to Symmetry

Humans are very sensitive to symmetry in visual patterns. Symmetry is detected and recognized very rapidly, and eye fixations are concentrated along the axis of symmetry or the symmetrical center of the patterns. This suggests that symmetry is a highly salient feature. Existing computational models of saliency, however, have mainly focused on contrast as a measure of saliency. These models do n...