Fig. 1

Behavioral paradigm to study spatial attention and attentional effects on neural activity. a Three monkeys were trained to covertly attend to a cued RDP while a single stimulus was presented inside the receptive field (RF, gray-filled circle) and one/two RDPs were presented outside the RF (one for monkey H and two for monkeys C and T). For illustration purposes, the fixation point is shown as a plus sign, and the target RDP has been marked with a white dashed-line circle. The target was cued using either a static RDP in the same position as the target (for monkey H) or a small rectangle beside the fixation point (for monkeys C and T). b Spike density function for the multi-unit activity (MUA) averaged across all recording sites starting from stimulus onset. The solid line represents the MUA when the target was inside the RF and the dashed line when the target was outside the RF. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (SEM)