Neural Mechanisms of Stimulus-Driven Visual Attention

The processing of sensory input is influenced by a number of behavioral and contextual factors, and these factors appear to constrain the sensory information guiding adaptive behavior. This talk will discuss recent evidence on the neural circuits causally involved in the filtering of sensory information during selective attention. Much progress has been made in identifying the neural circuits controlling goal-driven, or top-down, visual attention. In contrast, the mechanisms controlling salience-driven, or bottom-up, visual attention remain largely unknown. His talk will focus on recent work in which they test the contribution of posterior parietal cortex to the representations of visual salience and to saliency-driven behavior.