Do Attention and Luminance Contrast Affect Neuronal Responses in the Same Way?
The environment supplies an overwhelming richness of stimulation. In the case of vision, at any given moment information is coming from all areas of the visual field and is represented by multiple features that change from one moment to the next and with each fixation of the eye. The properties of attention allow us to selectively perceive some stimuli and not others, such that one can efficiently process and respond to relevant information and inhibit momentarily irrelevant information. The neural basis of attention has been described as analogous to how a change in luminance level, or contrast, affects neuronal responses. If a stimulus in the receptive field of a neuron evokes a response from that cell, then increasing the brightness of that stimulus will increase the response. Similarly, if a stimulus in the receptive field of a neuron evokes a response in the absence of attention to that stimulus, then directing visual attention to that stimulus will increase the response of the ce
