Attention Increases the Spread of Modality-Invariant Information across the Cortex

Abstract

Attention shapes our perception by allowing us to focus on relevant stimuli that are selected for conscious processing. In this work we assessed to what degree attention influences the extraction of modality-invariant information, i.e., information that is independent of the input stimulus modality. To this end we analyze fMRI data of subjects viewing naturalistic images and reading short textual descriptions while paying attention to only one of the two modalities. Using cross-modality decoding we found modality-invariant representations in a small area of the cortex even in the absence of attention, spreading to much larger regions when stimuli are attended. This work demonstrates how state-of-the-art decoding techniques on large-scale data can be used to expand our knowledge on how attention shapes specific high-level representations in the brain.