title: Spatial attention enhances object coding in local and distributed representations of the lateral occipital complex.
abstract: The modulation of neural activity in visual cortex is thought to be a key mechanism of visual attention. The investigation of attentional modulation in high-level visual areas, however, is hampered by the lack of clear tuning or contrast response functions. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study we therefore systematically assessed how small voxel-wise biases in object preference across hundreds of voxels in the lateral occipital complex were affected when attention was directed to objects. We found that the strength of attentional modulation depended on a voxel's object preference in the absence of attention, a pattern indicative of an amplificatory mechanism. Our results show that such attentional modulation effectively increased the mutual information between voxel responses and object identity. Further, these local modulatory effects led to improved information-based object readout at the level of multi-voxel activation patterns and to an increased reproducibility of these patterns across repeated presentations. We conclude that attentional modulation enhances object coding in local and distributed object representations of the lateral occipital complex.
authors: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany; Visual Perception Laboratory, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: matthias.guggenmos@bccn-berlin.de.
authors: Matthias
authors: M
authors: Guggenmos
authors: School of Psychology, University of East London, London, UK.
authors: Volker
authors: V
authors: Thoma
authors: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany.
authors: John-Dylan
authors: JD
authors: Haynes
authors: Department of Neurology, Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany.
authors: Alan
authors: A
authors: Richardson-Klavehn
authors: Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.
authors: Radoslaw Martin
authors: RM
authors: Cichy
authors: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany; Visual Perception Laboratory, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany.
authors: Philipp
authors: P
authors: Sterzer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Lateral occipital complex; Multivariate pattern analysis; Mutual information; Objects; fMRI