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Related Concept Videos

Association Areas of the Cortex

Association Areas of the Cortex

Association areas are regions of the cerebral cortex that do not have a specific sensory or motor function. Instead, they integrate and interpret information from various sources to enable higher cognitive processes such as memory, learning, and decision-making. Some key association areas include the following:
Prefrontal Association Area: This area is located in the frontal lobe and is involved in planning, decision-making, and moderating social behavior. It connects with primary motor areas,...

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

The cerebral cortex, the brain's outermost layer, is pivotal in processing complex cognitive tasks, emotions, and various sensory inputs and executing voluntary motor activities. This intricate structure is divided into three primary functional areas: the motor areas, sensory areas, and association areas.
Motor Areas
The motor areas located in the frontal lobe are central to controlling voluntary movements. This region is further subdivided into the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex.

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

The somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobes is crucial for interpreting sensory data such as touch, temperature, and proprioception. The somatosensory cortex, situated in the parietal lobes, plays a vital role in interpreting sensory information like touch, temperature, and proprioception—awareness of body position. This specialized brain region features an organized structure wherein neurons at the top primarily process sensations originating from the lower body. In contrast, those at the...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 3, 2026

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Published on: July 5, 2015

Feature-specific attentional priority signals in human cortex.

Taosheng Liu¹, Luke Hospadaruk, David C Zhu

¹Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|March 25, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The brain represents attended features, not just location. Frontal and parietal areas decode attended motion or color, showing multiplexed signals for nonspatial feature priority.

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Published on: March 18, 2019

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Visual Attention

Background:

Humans flexibly attend to spatial location and stimulus features like color and motion.
The neural basis of spatial attention is linked to priority maps in frontal and parietal areas, but feature-based attention representation remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how the brain represents attended features.
To examine the neural signals associated with feature-based attention deployment.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) decoded attended features in visual, frontal, and parietal areas.
Classifier weight maps analyzed activity patterns for attending to motion versus color.

Main Results:

Sustained fMRI responses were observed during feature-based attention tasks.
Attended features (motion, color) were successfully decoded in early visual and frontal-parietal areas.
Distinct activity patterns emerged when attending to motion versus color, indicating specialized neuronal subpopulations.

Conclusions:

Frontal and parietal cortical areas represent feature-based attention through multiplexed signals.
Neural representations in these areas are not solely spatial but also encode priorities for nonspatial features.
This challenges the notion of purely spatial priority maps and highlights feature-specific processing.