TY - JOUR
T1 - Spatiotopic coding of BOLD signal in human visual cortex depends on spatial attention
AU - Crespi, Sofia
AU - Biagi, Laura
AU - d'Avossa, Giovanni
AU - Burr, David C.
AU - Tosetti, Michela
AU - Morrone, Maria Concetta
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - The neural substrate of the phenomenological experience of a stable visual world remains obscure. One possible mechanism would be to construct spatiotopic neural maps where the response is selective to the position of the stimulus in external space, rather than to retinal eccentricities, but evidence for these maps has been inconsistent. Here we show, with fMRI, that when human subjects perform concomitantly a demanding attentive task on stimuli displayed at the fovea, BOLD responses evoked by moving stimuli irrelevant to the task were mostly tuned in retinotopic coordinates. However, under more unconstrained conditions, where subjects could attend easily to the motion stimuli, BOLD responses were tuned not in retinal but in external coordinates (spatiotopic selectivity) in many visual areas, including MT, MST, LO and V6, agreeing with our previous fMRI study. These results indicate that spatial attention may play an important role in mediating spatiotopic selectivity.
AB - The neural substrate of the phenomenological experience of a stable visual world remains obscure. One possible mechanism would be to construct spatiotopic neural maps where the response is selective to the position of the stimulus in external space, rather than to retinal eccentricities, but evidence for these maps has been inconsistent. Here we show, with fMRI, that when human subjects perform concomitantly a demanding attentive task on stimuli displayed at the fovea, BOLD responses evoked by moving stimuli irrelevant to the task were mostly tuned in retinotopic coordinates. However, under more unconstrained conditions, where subjects could attend easily to the motion stimuli, BOLD responses were tuned not in retinal but in external coordinates (spatiotopic selectivity) in many visual areas, including MT, MST, LO and V6, agreeing with our previous fMRI study. These results indicate that spatial attention may play an important role in mediating spatiotopic selectivity.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0021661
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0021661
M3 - Article
C2 - 21750720
AN - SCOPUS:79960046913
VL - 6
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 7
M1 - e21661
ER -