A neural pooling hypothesis for target selection in visual search

The key role of the neural mechanisms underlying visual search is to convert stimulus-based signals into goal-based signals to select the relevant object depending on the ongoing behavioral context. We found that in a visual search task the population average response of V4 neurons reflects the location of the target stimulus (goal-based factor), even though the responses of individual V4 neurons primarily reflect the stimulus configurations (stimulus-based factor), suggesting that neural pooling in area V4 plays a key role for this signal conversion. We examined how a neural pooling mechanism achieves this signal conversion for target selection in visual search.