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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Intracortical Inhibition Within the Primary Motor Cortex Can Be Modulated by Changing the Focus of Attention
Published on: September 11, 2017
Top-down enhancement and suppression of activity in category-selective extrastriate cortex from an act of reflective
Matthew R Johnson1, Marcia K Johnson
1Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. matthew.r.johnson@yale.edu
Abstract:
Recent research has demonstrated top-down attentional modulation of activity in extrastriate category-selective visual areas while stimuli are in view (perceptual attention) and after they are removed from view (reflective attention). Perceptual attention is capable of both enhancing and suppressing activity in category-selective areas relative to a passive viewing baseline. In this study, we demonstrate that a brief, simple act of reflective attention ("refreshing") is also capable of both enhancing and suppressing activity in some scene-selective areas (the parahippocampal place area [PPA]) but not others (refreshing resulted in enhancement but not in suppression in the middle occipital gyrus [MOG]). This suggests that different category-selective extrastriate areas preferring the same class of stimuli may contribute differentially to reflective processing of one's internal representations of such stimuli.
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