An explicit saliency map in monkey visual cortex?

This presents supplementary information for Figure 2 in our review article "Computational Modelling of Visual Attention" by Laurent Itti and Christof Koch, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, February 2001. In Figure 2 we describe an experiment by Gottlieb and colleagues (Gottlieb et al., Nature 1998;391:481-484) which specifically tests whether some neurons in area LIP respond to stimulus salience (rather, for example, than mere presence or absence of a stimulus).

In order to make the effect more readily observable on the Web, here we replaced the saccadic eye movement in Gottlieb et al.'s experiment by a shift of the entire display; so, the images below should be interpreted as being in retinal coordinates. The "Neuron's view" below simulate what is present in the retinotopic receptive field of a neuron, located to the right and about half-way down in the visual field; this represents one of the many neurons in area LIP Gottlieb et al. recorded from.

Please wait until the page is fully loaded before clicking on any link below. You need to have JavaScript enabled for this demonstration to work.

  Single stimulus Stable Array Recent onset
Stimulus show show show
Neuron's view show show show

There are three basic conditions in Gottlieb et al.'s experiment: