Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
6203929 | Vision Research | 2009 | 16 Pages |
Past physiological and psychophysical experiments have shown that attention can modulate the effects of contextual information appearing outside the classical receptive field of a cortical neuron. Specifically, it has been suggested that attention, operating via cortical feedback connections, gates the effects of long-range horizontal connections underlying collinear facilitation in cortical area V1. This article proposes a novel mechanism, based on the computations performed within the dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells, that can account for these observations. Furthermore, it is shown that the top-down gating signal into V1 can result from a process of biased competition occurring in extrastriate cortex. A model based on these two assumptions is used to replicate the results of physiological and psychophysical experiments on collinear facilitation and attentional modulation.