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LIP responses to a popout stimulus are reduced if it is overtly ignored

Nature Neuroscience volume 9, pages 1071–1076 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Bright objects capture our attention by virtue of 'popping out' from their surroundings. This correlates with strong responses in cortical areas thought to be important in attentional allocation. Previous studies have suggested that with the right mindset or training, humans can ignore popout stimuli. We studied the activity of neurons in monkey lateral intraparietal area while monkeys performed a visual search task. The monkeys were free to move their eyes, and a distractor, but never the search target, popped out. On trials in which the monkeys made a saccade directly to the search target, the popout distractor evoked a smaller response than the non-popout distractors. The intensity of the response to the popout correlated inversely with the monkeys' ability to ignore it. We suggest that this modulation corresponds to a top-down mechanism that the brain uses to adjust the parietal representation of salience.

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Figure 1: Behavioral task.
Figure 2: Percentage of first saccades to the popout distractor before and during recording.
Figure 3: Responses to the target or distractors within the neuron's receptive field.
Figure 4: Response to popout and non-popout distractors in three epochs of the trial for each monkey.
Figure 5: Cell-by-cell correlation of response suppression with saccade suppression.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Osman and G. Asfaw for veterinary care, Y. Pavlova for expert assistance with animal care, G. Duncan for electronic and systems work and L. Palmer for her indispensable help. Preliminary experiments were performed at the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. The research was supported by grants to M.E.G. from the National Eye Institute (R01 EY014978-01 and R24 EY015634-01), the Whitehall, James S. MacDonnell and W.M. Keck Foundations, and the David Mahoney Chair at Columbia University; and to A.L.G. from the National Science Foundation.

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Author notes

  1. James W Bisley

    Present address: Department of Neurobiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, 10833 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90095, USA

  2. James W Bisley and Michael E Goldberg: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mahoney Center for Brain and Behavior, Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York, 10032, New York, USA

    Anna E Ipata, Angela L Gee, Jacqueline Gottlieb, James W Bisley & Michael E Goldberg

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York, 10032, New York, USA

    Jacqueline Gottlieb & Michael E Goldberg

  3. Department of Neurology, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, 710 West 168th Street, New York, 10032, New York, USA

    Michael E Goldberg

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  1. Anna E Ipata
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Contributions

A.E.I. and A.L.G. performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared the figures and contributed to the manuscript preparation. J.G. first suggested studying the response to a task-irrelevant popout in a search task. J.W.B. and M.E.G. supervised the experiments, the analysis of the data and the preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anna E Ipata.

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Ipata, A., Gee, A., Gottlieb, J. et al. LIP responses to a popout stimulus are reduced if it is overtly ignored. Nat Neurosci 9, 1071–1076 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1734

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