Tim Buschman and Sabine Kastner review work on visual attention and propose a new theory that ties together a wide range of observations. Here’s an outline of the theory in their own words:
- Attention can either be (a) automatically grabbed by salient stimuli or (b) guided by task representations in frontal and parietal regions to specific spatial locations or features.
- The pattern-completion nature of sensory cortex sharpens the broad top-down attentional bias, restricting it to perceptually relevant representations. Interactions with bottom-up sensory drive will emphasize specific objects.
- Interneuron-mediated lateral inhibition normalizes activity and, thus, suppresses competing stimuli. This results in increased sensitivity and decreased noise correlations.
- Lateral inhibition also leads to the generation of high-frequency synchronous oscillations within a cortical region. Inter-areal synchronization follows as these local oscillations synchronize along with the propagation of a bottom-up sensory drive. Both forms of synchrony act to further boost selected representations.
- Further buildup of inhibition acts to “reset” the network, thereby restarting the process. This reset allows the network to avoid being captured by a single stimulus and allows a positive-only selection mechanism to move over time.
Makes a lot of sense.
Buschman, Timothy J., and Sabine Kastner. “From Behavior to Neural Dynamics: An Integrated Theory of Attention.” Neuron 88.1 (2015): 127-144.