Neurocomputational mechanisms of visual search

The collaboration between neurophysiology and mathematical psychology has afforded new and useful insights into the neurocomputational mechanisms of decision making. I will describe a new model of how visual salience is located that accounts for the diversity of modulation patterns among neurons in frontal eye field (FEF) and predicts the dynamics of evidence accumulation. I will also describe new results from extrastriate area V4 that reveal the laminar and temporal organization of target selection under priming of pop out. I will conclude by surveying results obtained with a first-of-its-kind investigation using multi-factorial manipulations to dissect salience localization, rule encoding, and saccade preparation operations.