Attention, intention and salience in the posterior parietal cortex

Abstract Selecting visual targets for saccadic eye movements is a vital step in sensorimotor processing. This selection is made on the basis of target salience: a saccade tends to be made to the most interesting part of the visual field. Both bottom-up and top-down processes have been postulated to contribute to salience, but the exact mechanisms by which some areas of the visual field are rendered to be more interesting than others remain unclear. We propose a computational model to address this issue and investigate its significant features, relating it to neuroanatomy and to aspects of cognitive function.