VOLUNTARY ATTENTION MODULATES FMRI ACTIVITY IN HUMAN MT-MST

How does voluntary attention to one attribute of a visual stimulus aff ect the neural processing of that stimulus? We used functional magneti c resonance imaging to examine the attentional modulation of neural ac tivity in the human homolog of the MT-MST complex, which is known to b e involved in the processing of visual motion. Using a visual stimulus containing both moving and stationary dots, we found significantly mo re MT-MST activation when subjects attended to the moving dots than wh en they attended to the stationary dots, even though the visual stimul us was identical during the two conditions.