Mechanisms of directed attention in the human extrastriate cortex as revealed by functional MRI

A typical scene contains many different objects, but the capacity of the visual system to process multiple stimuli at a given time is limited. Thus, attentional mechanisms are required to select relevant objects from among the many objects competing for visual processing. Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in humans showed that when multiple stimuli are present simultaneously in the visual Þeld, their cortical representations within the object recognition pathway interact in a competitive, suppressive fashion. Directing attention to one of the stimuli counteracts the suppressive inßuence of nearby stimuli. This mechanism may serve to Þlter out irrelevant information in cluttered visual scenes. The human visual system is usually confronted with cluttered scenes consisting of many differ-ent objects, which cannot all be processed si-multaneously. Only a limited amount of what we see reaches consciousness and become