Attention during natural vision warps semantic representation across the human brain
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Little is known about how attention changes the cortical representation of sensory information in humans. On the basis of neurophysiological evidence, we hypothesized that attention causes tuning changes to expand the representation of attended stimuli at the cost of unattended stimuli. To investigate this issue, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure how semantic representation changed during visual search for different object categories in natural movies. We found that many voxels across occipito-temporal and fronto-parietal cortex shifted their tuning toward the attended category. These tuning shifts expanded the representation of the attended category and of semantically related, but unattended, categories, and compressed the representation of categories that were semantically dissimilar to the target. Attentional warping of semantic representation occurred even when the attended category was not present in the movie; thus, the effect was not a target-detection artifact. These results suggest that attention dynamically alters visual representation to optimize processing of behaviorally relevant objects during natural vision.
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Frontoparietal regions create flexible stimulus representations that are in line with behavioral goals.
“Together, these results suggest complementary roles for early visual cortex and frontoparietal regions [30][31][32], whereby frontoparietal regions create flexible stimulus representations that are in line with behavioral goals [3,33].”
From Shared representations for working memory and mental imagery in early visual cortex (2013) · cites this paper as [33]
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- Authors
- Çukur, T., Nishimoto, S., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Center for Information and Neural Networks (JP)
- Corresponding author
- Gallant, Jack L
- Venue
- Nature Neuroscience
- Published
- 2013-04-21
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 763-770
- ISSN
- 1097-6256 (ISSN-L)
- 1546-1726
- PMC
- PMC3929490
- OpenAlex
- W2008193883
- Cited by
- 351
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 22 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 38 · 2017: 34 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 32 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 8
- FWCI
- 15.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Ögonfonden
- National Institutes of Health (5r01ey019684-08)
- National Eye Institute (R01-EY019684, R01EY022454, EY022454, EY019684)
- 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 › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- visual attention, semantic representation, naturalistic video stimuli, visual search, semantic relatedness, occipitotemporal cortex, frontoparietal cortex
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Attention, Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, Concept Formation, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Motion Pictures, Neuropsychological Tests, Semantics, Visual Perception
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