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Books Received
Primate-Science / PrimateLit


VISUAL ATTENTION AND CORTICAL CIRCUITS

Edited by Jochen Braun, Christof Koch, and Joel L. Davis


A Bradford Book


The MIT Press 2001



FROM THE COVER:


The neurobiology and psychology of attention have much to learn from
each other. Neurobiologists recognize that responses in sensory cortex
depend on the behavioral relevance of a stimulus, but have few ways
to study how perception changes as a result. Psychologists have the
conceptual and methodological tools to do just that, but are
confounded by the multiple interpretations and theoretical ambiguities.
This book attempts to bridge the two fields and to derive a
comprehensive theory of attention from both neurobiological and
psychological data. It highlights situations where attention can be
seen to alter both neural activity and psychophysical
performance/phenomenal experience. This "bicultural"; approach
contributes not only to attention research but to the larger goal
of conscious experience.


The book focuses mainly on the effects of visual attention on the
ventral and dorsal streams of visual cortex in human and monkeys and
the associated changes in visual performance. Several large findings
emerge: attention may involve more than one neural system; attention
modulates all stages of cortical visual processing; the effect of
attention is constrained by the intrinsic connectivity of cortex and
the resulting contextual interactions; and the notion of a "saliency
map"; remains central to thinking about visual attention. The book
also considers several approaches to evaluating the same variable
through different methods, such as behavioral measurements,
functional imaging, and single-unit recording.



Jochen Braun is Professor of Cognitive and Theoretical neurobiology
at the University of Plymouth.


Christof Koch is Professor of Computation and Neural Systems at the
California Institute of Technology and the author of Biophysics of
Computation.


Joel L. Davis is a Scientific Officer, Computational Neuroscience,
at the Office of Naval Research.


CONTENTS


Preface ix
Overview xi
Jochen Braun and Christof Koch


1. Imaging Expectations and Attentional
Modulations in the Human Brain 1
Maurizio Corbetta and Gordon L. Shulman


2. Neuronal Correlates of Attention in Human Visual Cortex 25
David J. Heeger, Sunil P. Gandhi, Alexander C. Huk,
and Geoffrey M. Boynton


3. Capacity Limits in Selective Attention: Behavioral
Evidence and Implications for Neural Activity 49
Nilli Lavie


4. Frontal Lobe Function and the Control of Visual Attention 69
John Duncan


5. Attentional Modulation of Contextual Influences 89
Minami Ito, Gerald Westheimer,
and Charles D. Gilbert


6. Effects of Attention on the Responsiveness and
Selectivity of Individual Neurons in Visual Cerebral Cortex 103
John H. R. Maunsell and Carrie J. McAdams


7. Neural Mechanisms of Attentional Selection 121
John H. Reynolds and Robert Desimone


8. From Attention to Action in Frontal Cortex 137
Kirk G. Thompson, Narcisse P. Bichot,
and Jeffrey D. Schall


9. Separating Attention from Chance in Active Visual Search 159
Brad C. Motter and James W. Holsapple


10. Two Computational Models of Attention 177
George Sperling, Adam Reeves, Erik Blaser,
Zhong-Lin Lu, and Erich Weichselgartner


11. Perceptual Consequences of Multilevel Selection 215
Jochen Braun, Christof Koch,
D. Kathleen Lee, and Laurent Itti


12. The Resolution of Ambiguous Motion:
Attentional Modulation and Development 243
Shinsuke Shimojo, Katsumi Watanabe,
and Christian Scheier


13. The Relevance of Fisher Information for
Theories of Cortical Computation and Attention 265
Alexandre Pouget, Sophie Deneve,
and Peter E. Latham


14. From Foundational Principles to a
Hierarchical Selection Circuit for Attention 285
John K. Tsotsos, Sean M. Culhane,
and Florin Cutzu


Contributors 307
Index 309



WHERE TO ORDER:


The MIT Press
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142-1493


PHONE: 1-800-356-0343 (617) 625-8569
FAX: (617) 625-6660
E-MAIL: mitpress-orders@mit.edu


PRICE: $60.00 ISBN 0-262-02493-4

URL: http://www.primate.wisc.edu/pin/review/visual.html
Page last modified: November 6, 2001
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