Neuroscientists identify how the brain works to select what we (want to) see

If you are looking for a particular object — say a yellow pencil — on a cluttered desk, how does your brain work to visually locate it?

For the first time, a team led by Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientists has identified how different neural regions communicate to determine what to visually pay attention to and what to ignore. This finding is a major discovery for visual cognition and will guide future research into visual and attention deficit disorders.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, used various brain imaging techniques to show exactly how the visual cortex and parietal cortex send direct information to each other through white matter connections in order to specifically pick out the information that you want to see.

"We have demonstrated that attention is a process in which there is one-to-one mapping between the first place visual information comes from the eyes into the brain and beyond to other parts of the brain," said Adam S. Greenberg, postdoctoral fellow in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Psychology and lead author of the study.

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