Study on impacts on receptive field in hierarchical visual areas caused by attention and different attending stimulus

Visual attention is an important issue in the field of neuroscience and computer vision. Previous researches showed that visual attention could impact the distributions of receptive field (RF), thus modulating the processing of visual information. However, the impact was complicated. To further research how visual attention and different attending stimulus impact RFs in hierarchical visual areas, we conducted three task experiments, face-attention task, checkerboard-attention task, and checkerboard-view experiment. And for functional resonance imaging (fMRI) responses of each task, we adopted two-dimensional Gaussian receptive field model to characterize the population receptive field(pRF) of each voxel in eight visual areas [V1-V4, latera loccipital complex (LOC), inferior occipital gyrus (IOG), posterior fusiform gyrus (pFus), and mid-fusiform gyrus (mFus)]. Comparing the pRFs between checkerboard-attention and checkerboard-view task, the result showed that the impacts of visual attention on pRFs appeared to be much more significant along the hierarchical visual areas. Comparing the pRFs between face-attention and checkerboard-attention task, we found that comparing with checkerboard, attending to face stimulus could selectively modulate pRFs in higher areas, particularly in face-selective areas. Our result further indicated that, the impact of visual attention on the processing of senior semantic information varied across visual areas, and the impact was more significant in higher areas.