Spatial attention alters visual cortical representation during target anticipation

Abstract

Attention enables us to efficiently and flexibly interact with the environment by prioritizing some image features, such as location or orientation, even before stimulus onset. We investigated how covert spatial attention affects responses in human visual cortex prior to target onset and how it affects behavioral performance after target onset, using a concurrent psychophysics-fMRI experiment. Performance improved at cued locations and worsened at uncued locations, relative to distributed attention. BOLD responses in cortical visual field maps changed in two ways: First, there was a stimulus- independent baseline shift, positive in map locations near the cued location and negative elsewhere. Second, population receptive field centers shifted toward the attended location. Both effects increased in higher visual areas. Together, the results show that spatial attention has large effects on visual cortex prior to target appearance, altering neural response properties across the entirety of multiple visual field maps.