Neuronal Dynamics of Selective Information Processing in the Human Brain as Exemplified in the Visual Cortex

It is commonly accepted that stimulus processing is performed in a neuronal network, comprising several cortical and possibly subcortical areas. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of synchronized neuronal activity in selective visual stimulus processing. In the first studies, we investigated the hypothesis that synchronized neuronal activity might serve as mechanism for preferred processing of an attended stimulus. In a second series, we drove cortical networks, related to visual stimulus processing, with an external pacemaker to study basic principles of visual attention. In particular, we were interested in cortical principles of sustained attention. We were able to show that the allocation of attention may be governed by different principles under conditions of sustained attention for continuously presented stimuli as opposed to transiently presented stimuli with long inter-stimulus intervals.