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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on October 24, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm158
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© 2007 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.

The Representation of Spatial Attention in Human Parietal Cortex Dynamically Modulates with Performance

Wendy E. Huddleston1,3 and Edgar A. DeYoe1,2

1 Department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Anatomy, 2 Department of Radiology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA, 3 Department of Human Movement Sciences, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, PT Program, Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413, USA

Address correspondence to Wendy E. Huddleston at Department of Human Movement Sciences, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, PT–Pavilion 350, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA. Email huddlest{at}uwm.edu.

The control and allocation of attention is an essential, ubiquitous neural process that gates our awareness of objects and events in the environment. Neural representations of the locus of spatial attention have been previously demonstrated in parietal cortex. However, the behavioral relevance of these neural representations is not known. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, subjects performed a covert spatial attention task that yielded a wide range of performance values. Voxels in parietal cortex selective for attended target location also dynamically modulated, becoming more or less responsive as performance levels changed. Surprisingly, this relationship was not linear. Responses peaked at intermediate performance levels and dropped both when performance was very high and when it was very low. Such dynamic modulation may represent a mechanism for organizing neural control signals according to behavioral task demands.

Key Words: behavior • functional magnetic resonance imaging • vision


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