4. Conclusions

The results of the experiments indicate a strong effect of attention on the neural processing of visual motion. The results of experiment one indicate neurons in areas MT and MST of macaque the monkey visual cortex increase their response when attention is directed into their receptive field. When attention is directed towards one of two competing stimuli in the receptive field, the results of experiment two suggest that the response of neurons depends on movement of attended stimuli (experiment two) while the influence of the ignored stimulus is greatly reduced. As summarized by the authors, "the findings of this study indicate attention modulates motion processing from stages early in the dorsal visual pathway by selectively enhancing the representation of attended stimuli and simultaneously reducing the influence of unattended stimuli".

Finally, response of neurons throughout the extrastriate cortex are greatly affected by the behavioral state. Visual input is simply one factor in the understanding of the processing of information by the visual system!