As in covert attention, overt attention also involves the visual selection of a target, and all of its component visual features, to the exclusion of other stimuli, as in our opening example. To achieve ZD1839 accurate visual guidance of saccades, saccades that incorporate the target’s component visual features, this must be true (e.g., Schafer and Moore, 2007). Correspondingly, as in covert attention, overt attention is accompanied by a selective enhancement of visual cortical signals (e.g., Moore and Chang, 2009), an effect that is consistent with the perceptual

enhancement known to occur at the target of gaze shifts (Deubel and Schneider, 1996). In other words, there are perceptual effects that accompany both types of attention, as well as neural correlates of those effects, in spite of the clear differences in motor outcome. Therefore, future studies might include a comparison of FEF activity, including its synchrony with other brain structures, between tasks in which attention is directed to (identical) visual stimuli with or without the execution of a gaze shift. “
“As a child growing up in New Haven, CT and Palo Alto, CA, Chi-Bin Chien was so academically gifted that he skipped straight Selleck Epacadostat from the third to the eighth grade and, at the unbelievable age

of 12, entered Johns Hopkins University as a Physics major. He was accepted to do graduate work in Physics at Caltech tuclazepam at the age of 15 but was considered too young to enter the program, so he took a fellowship at Cambridge University for a year. At 16, he began his PhD studies with the experimental physicist Jerry Pine, who had recently turned his attention to neurobiology and had pioneered the development of multielectrode arrays for studies of neuronal networks in vitro. Chi-Bin’s gift was not just his scintillating brilliance, because underneath he was a truly motivated scientist who was prepared to take practical and laborious steps to reach a distant goal. In the Pine laboratory, he designed

an elegant apparatus that was sensitive enough to measure single action and synaptic potentials in cultured neurons using voltage-sensitive dyes (Chien and Pine, 1991). Consideration of how the neural networks in his experimental dishes made connections with each other sparked Chi-Bin to choose the area of research in which he made most of his major contributions to knowledge: how the nervous system wires up in development. That he was interested in exploring this problem in vivo was the main reason we were lucky enough to attract Chi-Bin to work with us at UCSD. Chi-Bin made a number of remarkable innovations in our laboratory. For example, he developed a viewing chamber in which it was possible to observe single Xenopus retinal axons growing in the brain while washing various pharmacological reagents in and out as a way of probing the signaling systems that growth cones use to navigate correctly.