Stefan Treue
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Goettingen, Germany

Cortical Area MT - Model Area for the Interface Between Visual Sensation and Cognition?

Area MT in primate visual cortex is arguably the best understood area in primate extrastriate visual cortex in terms of its representation of the incoming (bottom-up) sensory information. MT is considered to be of critical importance for our ability to perceive the visual motion patterns in our environment.
This level of understanding of the neural representation of sensory information in one cortical area is an excellent basis for investigating the top-down influences exerted by various types of attention on MT responses.
The talk will give an overview of the multitude of attentional effects that have been discovered with this focused approach.
From these investigations a clear pattern emerges that turns MT into a model area for the interaction of sensory (bottom-up) signals with cognitive (top-down) modulatory influences that characterizes visual perception. These findings also document how this interaction enables visual cortex to actively generate a neural representation of the environment that combines the high-performance sensory periphery with selective modulatory influences for producing an "integrated saliency map" of the environment.

This lecture is made possible by a generous Endowment by the family of Allen. L. Edwards.