The neurobiology of selective attention

Research in the field of selective visual attention has recently seen substantial progress in several areas. Neuroimaging and electrical recording results have indicated that selective attention amplifies neural activity in prestriate areas concerned with basic visual processing. Imaging and cellular studies are delineating the networks of anatomical areas that serve as the source of attentional modulation and have suggested that these networks are anatomically distinct from the sites of the resulting amplifications. Cognitive studies of visual search have explored the role of these amplified computations in the integration of visual features into objects. Attentional effects in normal subjects, and their disruption following brain injury, have revealed the mental representations upon which attention operates.