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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on February 11, 2009
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(10):2466-2478; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp002
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Attention Reshapes Center-Surround Receptive Field Structure in Macaque Cortical Area MT

Katharina Anton-Erxleben, Valeska M. Stephan and Stefan Treue

Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

Address correspondence to Dr Katharina Anton-Erxleben, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany. Email: kantonerxleben{at}dpz.gwdg.de.

Directing spatial attention to a location inside the classical receptive field (cRF) of a neuron in macaque medial temporal area (MT) shifts the center of the cRF toward the attended location. Here we investigate the influence of spatial attention on the profile of the inhibitory surround present in many MT neurons. Two monkeys attended to the fixation point or to 1 of 2 random dot patterns (RDPs) placed inside or next to the cRF, whereas a third RDP (the probe) was briefly presented in quick succession across the cRF and surround. The probe presentation responses were used to compute a map of the excitatory receptive field and its inhibitory surround. Attention systematically reshapes the receptive field profile, independently shifting both center and surround toward the attended location. Furthermore, cRF size is changed as a function of relative distance to the attentional focus: attention inside the cRF shrinks it, whereas directing attention next to the cRF expands it. In addition, we find systematic changes in surround inhibition and cRF amplitude. This nonmultiplicative push–pull modulation of the receptive field's center-surround structure optimizes processing at and near the attentional focus to strengthen the representation of the attended stimulus while reducing influences from distractors.

Key Words: motion processing • physiology • spatial summation • tuning • visual system


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