Abstract

Contributions to this edited volume argue for the existence of top-down, context- and task-dependant modulating mechanisms of attention occurring in the mammalian brain. Such positions support the view that areas of the brain traditionally thought to be involved in relatively 'late' stages of visual processing activity can, and do affect the response properties of 'early' visual processing neurons, including primary visual cortex. Neural circuitries concerned with the processing of visual information should now be viewed less as involving unidirectional mappings from sensory input to motor output for the purposes of planning visually-guided movements. Instead, the attentional processes required to support the co-ordination of sensorimotor transformation functions involve a variety of widely distributed parallel and reciprocally connected neural pathways, including the visual, parietal and frontal cortex.