Influence and Limitations of Popout in the Selection of Salient Visual Stimuli by Area V4 Neurons

The neural mechanism of bottom-up attention and its relationship to top-down attention are poorly understood. Visual stimuli that differ from others in their component features are salient and tend to draw attention in a bottom-up manner. Popout stimuli differ uniformly from surrounding items and are more easily detected than stimuli composed of a conjunction of surrounding features. We compared the responses of single area V4 neurons to popout and conjunction stimuli appearing within the classical receptive field (CRF) and found that their responses are modulated by popout. This selectivity was more robust when larger numbers of surrounding items and multiple features were included in the display, and it was absent when only a few items were presented immediately outside the CRF. In addition, the popout modulation of V4 activity was eliminated when top-down attention was directed to locations outside of the CRFs during saccade preparation, indicating that the salience of popout stimuli is not sufficient to drive selection by V4 neurons. These results demonstrate that neurons in feature-selective cortex are influenced by bottom-up attention, but that this influence is limited by top-down attention.