Joint influence of goal-related and stimulus-driven attentional signals in the guidance of spatial attention (v1.0)

We used a search task including four stimuli, one in each quadrant of the screen, comprising goal-related and salience-related attentional signals. Using functional MRI, we measured the spatio-topic occipital activity during the processing of the stimulus arrays. We computed 2D spatial bias vectors combining local activity in the occipital regions that represent the four stimulus-locations. The resulting data index distributed activity across the occipital cortex and enabled us to quantify the joint impact of goal- and saliency-related signals across the visual field.