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This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: 102/4/2375    most recent 00680.2009v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Cohen, J. Y. Articles by Woodman, G. F. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Cohen, J. Y. Articles by Woodman, G. F.

RESEARCH-ARTICLE

On the Origin of Event-Related Potentials Indexing Covert Attentional Selection During Visual Search

Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Submitted 31 July 2009; accepted in final form 5 August 2009

ABSTRACT

Despite nearly a century of electrophysiological studies recording extracranially from humans and intracranially from monkeys, the neural generators of nearly all human event-related potentials (ERPs) have not been definitively localized. We recorded an attention-related ERP component, known as the N2pc, simultaneously with intracranial spikes and local field potentials (LFPs) in macaques to test the hypothesis that an attentional-control structure, the frontal eye field (FEF), contributed to the generation of the macaque homologue of the N2pc (m-N2pc). While macaques performed a difficult visual search task, the search target was selected earliest by spikes from single FEF neurons, later by FEF LFPs, and latest by the m-N2pc. This neurochronometric comparison provides an empirical bridge connecting macaque and human experiments and a step toward localizing the neural generator of this important attention-related ERP component.