Contextual Guidance of Attention: Human Intracranial Event-related Potential Evidence for Feedback Modulation in Anatomically Early Temporally Late Stages of Visual Processing

We investigated attentional guidance in early visual areas in the brain by recording event-related potentials directly from the surface of visual cortex. Patients performed a contextual cueing task in which attentive search to targets was guided by implicitly learned spatial context information. The earliest activity in striate cortex (area V1) was not modulated by contextual cueing, whereas later activity beginning at approximately 200 ms was enhanced by contextual cueing in V1, V2 and other portions of extrastriate cortex. These results suggest that context can enhance visual processing by temporally late top-down modulation of activity in anatomically early areas of visual cortex. Together with anatomical and neurophysiological studies in animals, these results suggest an excitatory feedback mechanism acting on apical dendrites of pyramidal cells in V1 and other areas of visual cortex.