Neural computations in the foveal and peripheral visual fields during active search

Foveal neural activity shows strong feature-based attentional enhancements, challenging the view that such modulation is mainly peripheral, during active visual search in monkeys.

• Why it matters: Understanding how attention is distributed across the entire visual field is crucial for modeling naturalistic vision, yet the specific role of foveal processing has been largely overlooked.
• What they did: Neural activity was recorded from both foveal and peripheral receptive fields in areas V4 and IT of monkeys engaged in free-gaze visual search among complex stimuli, revealing dynamic patterns of feature attention.
• The result: Foveal attention promotes sustained fixations on targets, while peripheral signals guide target detection and saccades, highlighting a complementary interaction that advances models of neural computations in active vision.