From Behavior to Neural Dynamics: An Integrated Theory of Attention

The brain has a limited capacity and therefore needs mechanisms to selectively enhance the information most relevant to one’s current behavior. We refer to these mechanisms as “attention.” Attention acts by increasing the strength of selected neural representations and preferentially routing them through the brain’s large-scale network. This is a critical component of cognition and therefore has been a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. Here we review a diverse literature that has studied attention at the level of behavior, networks, circuits, and neurons. We then integrate these disparate results into a unified theory of attention.