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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on July 21, 2004
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhh134
© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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Article

A Contralateral Preference in the Lateral Occipital Area: Sensory and Attentional Mechanisms

Matthias Niemeier 1*, Herbert C. Goltz 2, Anil Kuchinad 3, Douglas B. Tweed 4, Tutis Vilis 3

1 CIHR Group for Action and Perception; Department of Life Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario, M1C 1A4, Canada
2 CIHR Group for Action and Perception; Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C1, Canada
3 CIHR Group for Action and Perception; Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C1, Canada
4 CIHR Group for Action and Perception; Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A8, Canada

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: niemeier{at}utsc.utoronto.ca.


  Abstract

Here we examined the level of the lateral occipital (LO) area within the processing stream of the ventral visual cortex. An important determinant of an area's level of processing is whether it codes visual elements on both sides of the visual field, as do higher visual areas, or prefers those in the contralateral visual field, as do early visual areas. The former would suggest that LO, on one side, combines bilateral visual elements into a whole, while the latter suggests that it codes only the parts of forms. We showed that LO has a relative preference for visual objects in the contralateral visual field. LO responses were influenced by attention. However, relative changes in LO activity caused by changes in object location were preserved even when attention was shifted away from the objects to moving random dot patterns on the opposite side. Our data offer a new view on LO as an intermediate, but not a high-level, visual area in which neurons are driven by visual input and spatial attention in a multiplicative fashion.

Keywords: attention; fMRI; motion; object perception; topography.
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