Spatial attention improves reliability of fMRI retinotopic mapping signals in occipital and parietal cortex
Open accessAbstract
Spatial attention improves visual perception and increases the amplitude of neural responses in visual cortex. In addition, spatial attention tasks and fMRI have been used to discover topographic visual field representations in regions outside visual cortex. We therefore hypothesized that requiring subjects to attend to a retinotopic mapping stimulus would facilitate the characterization of visual field representations in a number of cortical areas. In our study, subjects attended either a central fixation point or a wedge-shaped stimulus that rotated about the fixation point. Response reliability was assessed by computing coherence between the fMRI time series and a sinusoid with the same frequency as the rotating wedge stimulus. When subjects attended to the rotating wedge instead of ignoring it, the reliability of retinotopic mapping signals increased by approximately 50% in early visual cortical areas (V1, V2, V3, V3A/B, V4) and ventral occipital cortex (VO1) and by approximately 75% in lateral occipital (LO1, LO2) and posterior parietal (IPS0, IPS1, IPS2) cortical areas. Additionally, one 5-min run of retinotopic mapping in the attention-to-wedge condition produced responses as reliable as the average of three to five (early visual cortex) or more than five (lateral occipital, ventral occipital, and posterior parietal cortex) attention-to-fixation runs. These results demonstrate that allocating attention to the retinotopic mapping stimulus substantially reduces the amount of scanning time needed to determine the visual field representations in occipital and parietal topographic cortical areas. Attention significantly increased response reliability in every cortical area we examined and may therefore be a general mechanism for improving the fidelity of neural representations of sensory stimuli at multiple levels of the cortical processing hierarchy.
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In detection and coarse discrimination tasks, Lau, Rahnev, and colleagues report that subjects overestimate their confidence in the periphery and for unattended stimuli.
“In detection and coarse discrimination tasks, Lau, Rahnev, and colleagues report that subjects overestimate their confidence in the periphery and for unattended stimuli.”
From Comparing Bayesian and non-Bayesian accounts of human confidence reports (2018) · cites this paper as [60]
The Methods (Task) and Results (Behavioral results; page unavailable) describe target detection across eccentricities and attention conditions, but not subjects’ confidence judgments. Searches for overestimated confidence, peripheral stimuli, and Lau or Rahnev found no passage in our copy supporting the attributed finding. (LLM, conf=0.75)
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Comparing Bayesian and non-Bayesian accounts of human confidence reports
Adler, W. T., & Ma, W. J. (2018) · PLoS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006572 · Cited by 118 · see citing works
Ban, H., Yamamoto, H., Hanakawa, T., Urayama, S.-I., Aso, T., Fukuyama, H., & Ejima, Y. (2013) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.1455-12.2013 · Cited by 80 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bressler, D. W., & Silver, M. A.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bressler, David W.
- ORCID
- Silver, Michael A.
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2010-11-01
- Volume
- 53
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 526-533
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2930091
- OpenAlex
- W2049016757
- Cited by
- 75
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 9
- FWCI
- 4.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Eye Institute (R21-EY17926, R21EY017926)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Spatial Neglect and Hemispheric Dysfunction
- Keywords
- spatial attention, retinotopic mapping, visual field representation, response reliability, early visual cortex, lateral occipital cortex, posterior parietal cortex, topographic map, scan time reduction
- MeSH terms
- Attention, Brain Mapping, Fixation, Ocular, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Functional Laterality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Occipital Lobe, Parietal Lobe, Photic Stimulation, Retina, Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted, Space Perception, Visual Cortex, Visual Pathways, Visual Perception, Reproducibility of Results
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