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 comparative ly little effort has gone into investigations of the role of these are as in selective attention to objects. In this paper we review the beha vioural and electrophysiological evidence, which suggests that the occ ipitotemporal areas are also important for selective attention to reco gnisable objects. Areas V4 and IT are seen to be involved in aspects o f selective attention driven by the spatial location of the attended o bject, features of objects, the relevance of a stimulus to a particula r task, and the amount of sustained attention required to perform a ta sk. The superior temporal polysensory area (STPa) is an area usually t hought of as a component of the temporal processing stream. However, t he evidence reviewed here shows that one role of area STPa is to decod e the direction of others' attention, a function which requires that t he region accesses information from both of the major corticocortical processing streams.