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The Journal of Neuroscience, March 29, 2006, 26(13):3532-3540; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4510-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
The Neural Site of Attention Matches the Spatial Scale of Perception

Jens-Max Hopf,^1,2 Steven J. Luck,³ Kai Boelmans,¹ Mircea A. Schoenfeld,¹ Carsten N. Boehler,² Jochem Rieger,¹ and Hans-Jochen Heinze^1,2

¹Department of Neurology II, Otto-von-Guericke University, D-39120 Magdeburg, Germany, ²Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, D-39120 Magdeburg, Germany, and ³Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1407

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Jens-Max Hopf, Department of Neurology II, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Leipziger Strasse 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany. Email: jens-max.hopf{at}medizin.uni-magdeburg.de

What is the neural locus of visual attention? Here we show that the locus is not fixed but instead changes rapidly to match the spatial scale of task-relevant information in the current scene. To accomplish this, we obtained electrical, magnetic, and hemodynamic measures of attention from human subjects while they detected large-scale or small-scale targets within multiscale stimulus patterns. Subjects did not know the scale of the target before stimulus onset, and yet the neural locus of attention-related activity between 250 and 300 ms varied according to the scale of the target. Specifically, maximal attention-related activity spread from a high-level, relatively anterior visual area (the lateral occipital complex) for large-scale targets to include a lower-level, more posterior area (visual area V4) for small-scale targets. This rapid change indicates that the neural locus of attention in visual cortex is not static but is instead determined rapidly and dynamically by means of an interaction between top-down task information and local information about the current visual input.

Key words: attention; visual search; spatial scale; human; MEG; fMRI

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Received June 10, 2005; revised Jan. 18, 2006; accepted Feb. 12, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Jens-Max Hopf, Department of Neurology II, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Leipziger Strasse 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany. Email: jens-max.hopf{at}medizin.uni-magdeburg.de

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