Attention is critical to high level cognition and it improves perceptual abilities. Many studies have delineated how attention affects neuronal firing rates, rate variability, and neuronal correlations, but a detailed understanding how this differs between cortical areas, layers and different cell types is only just emerging.

To address these questions, we recorded simultaneously from multiple layers in areas V1 and V4, while monkeys performed a covert feature based spatial attention task.

The presentation will delineate how attention affects different cell types in different layers of area V1 and V4, how attention affects oscillatory activity in these areas, and how it affects the information transfer between layers within an area and between areas.