**Please note: this seminar will be held at the Lenfest Center for the Arts (The Screening Room) on Columbia's Manhattanville campus. Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.**

Normal vision typically involves a close association between feature attention, spatial attention, and eye movements. For example, during search for a target in a cluttered scene, search is guided by attention to target features, and objects are sampled by targeted saccadic eye movements in the theta frequency range. Behavior in such tasks is thought to be mediated in part by an interaction between the ventral pre-arcuate cortex (VPA) in ventral prefrontal cortex and the frontal eye fields (FEF). Feedback from VPA appears to enhance processing of stimuli sharing target features, and feedback from FEF enhances the processing of stimuli that are the target of eye movements. By contrast, covert spatial attention is commonly thought to be an alternative mode of attention, which also depends on FEF but is thought to occur independently of eye movements. However, our recent evidence suggests that even in covert attention paradigms, attention shifts rhythmically in conjunction with microsaccades, which also occur in the theta range. Neuronal responses in area V4, IT cortex, and the pulvinar are enhanced only during microsaccade towards a target. Thus, regardless of the behavioral context, feature attention, dependent on feedback from VPA, appears to act globally on visual representations to guide eye movements, whereas spatial attention, dependent on feedback from FEF, acts locally on representations of stimuli that are the target of eye movements.

Robert Desimone is director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Prior to joining the McGovern Institute in 2004, he was director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Mental Health, the largest mental health research center in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Nabil Daddaouam (Gottlieb lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.