Visual attention in the occipitotemporal processing stream of the macaque

The occipitotemporal cortical areas of the macaque monkey are known to be important for normal object recognition processes, but comparatively little effort has gone into investigations of the role of these areas in selective attention to objects. In this paper we review the behavioural and electrophysiological evidence, which suggests that the occipitotemporal areas are also important for selective attention to recognisable objects. Areas V4 and IT are seen to be involved in aspects of selective attention driven by the spatial location of the attended object, features of objects, the relevance of a stimulus to a particular task, and the amount of sustained attention required to perform a task. The superior temporal polysensory area (STPa) is an area usually thought of as a component of the temporal processing stream. However, the evidence reviewed here shows that one role of area STPa is to decode the direction of others’ attention, a function which requires that the region accesses information from both of the major corticocortical processing streams.