CCN meeting | Max Hopf (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany), invited by Carola Dolci and Nico Boehler

Attentional tuning of visual selectivity in human visual cortex.

Attention is known to enhance visual selectivity via modulating the gain of visual cortex areas coding attended spatial locations or object features. The underlying neural mechanisms are extensively studied and comparably well characterized. What is little understood is how those mechanism adapt to changing demands for visual selectivity. For example, when shopping bananas we would coarsely search for yellow items in the food counter, but once we found them, we would differentiate nuances of yellow to find the best exemplars. In this talk, I will discuss data from MEG experiments investigating the cortical processes underlying the flexible adjustment of the resolution of space-based and feature-based selection. We will learn that the resolution of visual selectivity is adjusted by modulations across the visual cortex hierarchy, with the highest selectivity of space- and feature-based selection being mediated by opposite ends of the hierarchy.