Project Proposals

Abstract

Directing visual attention towards a particular location has been shown to modulate neu- ronal activity in the visual cortex in several different ways. These include increasing the firing rate, increasing the gamma frequency synchrony in the neural response and modulat- ing the spatial integration properties of neurons that are tuned towards the attended location. However, while neural oscillations have been implicated in several different attention-related processes, including the strengthening of neural signals and integration of sensory features into a single cognitive percept (the binding problem), so far attention-dependent changes in neural synchrony have only been observed in upstream areas such as visual areas V4 and MT. Here, I propose to investigate how attention affects the synchrony and spatial integration of neurons in macaque primary visual cortex in response to a visual stimulus, using data from