The Miller Lab

Ester et al addressed the dichotomy of source vs site in visual attention.  The frontoparietal cortex has long been thought to be the “source” of top-down attention signals that enhance activity at “sites” in posterior (sensory) cortex that represent visual stimuli.  They used fMRI, a roving searchlight analysis, and an inverted encoding model to show that stimulus representations are all over the cortex and enhanced by attention.  This calls the dichotomy between source and site into question.

Ester, Edward F., et al. “Feature-selective attentional modulations in human frontoparietal cortex.” The Journal of Neuroscience 36.31 (2016): 8188-8199.