Neuronal mechanisms of attention
-
1
German Primate Center, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Germany
The senses of man and other highly evolved species are an evolutionary success story. In the visual system of primates more than one million nerve fibers leave the retina and carry a very large amount of detailed information about our visual environment to the brain. But within a given situation the vast majority of this information is irrelevant for the organism. If evolution would not have equipped the nervous system with a mechanism to control the flow of information, only a small amount of the brain’s processing capacity would be available to handle the relevant parts of the incoming torrent of data. This central mechanism is attention. It enables the visual system to concentrate the processing resources onto the relevant information.
We do experience the allocation of attention as effortful but we are generally unaware of the extend to which attention influences our perception, i.e. how much vision is a constructive process. This manifests itself for example in our inability to notice even large changes in our visual environment, as long as they happen outside our focus of attention.
The presentation will present scientific findings about the neuronal basis of attentional influences on visual information processing. They are mostly based on measurements from the cortex of rhesus monkeys and show for example that even the first steps of the cortical processing of sensory information is already influences by attention.
Keywords:
Attention,
Motion Perception,
information processing and representation,
animal research,
Visual Cortex
Conference:
Belgian Brain Council, Liège, Belgium, 27 Oct - 27 Oct, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation (only for invited speakers)
Topic:
Higher Brain Functions in health and disease: cognition and memory
Citation:
Treue
S
(2012). Neuronal mechanisms of attention.
Conference Abstract:
Belgian Brain Council.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.210.00133
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
21 Jul 2012;
Published Online:
12 Sep 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Stefan Treue, German Primate Center, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Goettingen, 37077, Germany, treue@gwdg.de