Attention articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual search requires recognizing an object “invariantly”, despite changes in its appearance. Here, the authors show that humans can efficiently and invariantly search for objects in complex scenes and introduce a biologically-inspired zero-shot model that captures human eye movements during search.

    • Mengmi Zhang
    • , Jiashi Feng
    •  & Gabriel Kreiman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Superior colliculus (SC) and frontal eye fields (FEF) contain visuo-motor maps but their contributions to selective attention are not fully understood. Here, the authors perform reversible inactivations of the SC or FEF and report that loss of SC activity has a more devastating effect on attention.

    • Anil Bollimunta
    • , Amarender R. Bogadhi
    •  & Richard J. Krauzlis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working memory (WM) is represented in persistent activity of single neurons as well as a dynamic population code. Here, the authors find that neurons flexibly switch their coding according to current attention while those with stable resting activity maintain WM representations through dynamic activity patterns.

    • Sean E. Cavanagh
    • , John P. Towers
    •  & Steven W. Kennerley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prefrontal neurons exhibit both transient and persistent firing in working memory tasks. Here the authors report that the intrinsic timescale of neuronal firing outside the task is predictive of the temporal dynamics of coding during working memory in three frontoparietal brain areas.

    • D. F. Wasmuht
    • , E. Spaak
    •  & M. G. Stokes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Attention reduces correlated variability in population activity, however the effect of fluctuations in attentional state has not been studied. Here, the authors report in a novel visual task that fluctuations in attentional allocation have a pronounced effect on correlated variability at longer timescales.

    • George H. Denfield
    • , Alexander S. Ecker
    •  & Andreas S. Tolias

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anticipation helps to prioritise the processing of task-relevant sensory targets over irrelevant distractors. Here the authors analyse visual EEG responses and show that anticipation may do so by enhancing the neural representation of the target and by delaying the interference caused by distractors that follow closely in time.

    • Freek van Ede
    • , Sammi R. Chekroud
    •  & Anna C. Nobre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccades result in remapping the neural representation of a target object as well as its attentional modulation. Here the authors show that the trans-saccadic attentional shift is precisely synchronized with the saccade resulting in optimal maintenance of the locus of spatial attention.

    • Tao Yao
    • , Stefan Treue
    •  & B. Suresh Krishna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can identify a target picture even when presented within a rapid stream of stimuli. Here the authors report that the neural activity initially supports parallel processing of multiple stimuli around the target in ventral visual areas followed later by isolated activation of reported images in parietal areas.

    • Sébastien Marti
    •  & Stanislas Dehaene

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though people are easily able to recall items in a category without mentioning a wrong exemplar, the mechanism underlying this ability is unknown. Here, authors use intracranial recordings to show that this ability is likely due to a selective increase in baseline neuronal activity in category-specific regions.

    • Yitzhak Norman
    • , Erin M. Yeagle
    •  & Rafael Malach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception is guided by anticipating future events, but it is not clear how this is computed neurally. Here, the authors use ultra-fast fMRI to show that humans preplay anticipated visual sequences in the primary visual cortex and that this preplay correlates with faster detection of the stimuli.

    • Matthias Ekman
    • , Peter Kok
    •  & Floris P. de Lange

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Frontal eye field (FEF) is a visual prefrontal area involved in top-down attention. Here the authors report that FEF neurons projecting to V4/MT are persistently active during spatial working memory, and V4/MT neurons show changes in receptive field and gain at the location held in working memory.

    • Yaser Merrikhi
    • , Kelsey Clark
    •  & Behrad Noudoost

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saliency maps have been proposed to guide visual attention, yet the underlying neural correlates remain undetermined. Here, the authors record from monkeys as they watch videos of natural scenes, and find superior colliculus superficial visual-layer neurons exhibit activity patterns consistent with a visual saliency map.

    • Brian J. White
    • , David J. Berg
    •  & Douglas P. Munoz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Default mode network (DMN) is strongly modulated by idiosyncratic internal processes, but its involvement in processing external stimuli is unclear. Here, Simony and colleagues use an inter-subject functional correlation approach to extract DMN states that track stimulus features and behaviour.

    • Erez Simony
    • , Christopher J Honey
    •  & Uri Hasson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The amygdala in the medial temporal lobe of the human and non-human primate brain is known to process salient social stimuli and to mediate threat discrimination. Here, Dal Monte et al.show that rhesus monkeys with amygdala lesions have deficits in detecting threat signals and directing attention to the eye region of a conspecific's face.

    • Olga Dal Monte
    • , Vincent D. Costa
    •  & Bruno B. Averbeck

  • Article |

    Humans tend to attend to specific visual features rather than particular locations in space. In this study, Warren et al. use brain imaging and computational modelling to show that the same well-studied processes associated with spatial attention can also explain selective attention in non-spatial domains.

    • Scott G. Warren
    • , Essa Yacoub
    •  & Geoffrey M. Ghose

  • Article |

    The pulvinar nucleus is involved in modulating visual information. Fischer and Whitney use brain imaging to study the pulvinar during visual attention, and find that the positions and orientations of attended objects are precisely encoded in the pulvinar, while information about ignored objects is gated out.

    • Jason Fischer
    •  & David Whitney

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