(2009) of their meta-analysis of regions involved in top-down and bottom-up attention, with previously published analyses of top-down and bottom-up effects in episodic selleck screening library remembering ( Ciaramelli et al., 2008 and Vilberg and Rugg, 2008), did not support the idea of overlap between perceptual attention and memory processes, especially for ventral parietal cortex. And, as noted above, Sestieri et al. (2010) found different parietal areas associated with their perceptual and memory search tasks. Nevertheless, as Wagner et al. (2005) suggested,

parietal activity is associated with a number of factors important for memory judgments, including a subjective sense that the relevant information is old or new (independent of the memory’s www.selleckchem.com/products/OSI-906.html veracity, Johnson, 2006), level of detail that the memory supports, and retrieval orientation—the type of detail that participants are asked to retrieve about target memories. That is, parietal mechanisms may be involved in attending to internal, mnemonic representations, act as a buffer to integrate details that have been activated, reflect the overall strength of memories, and/or play a role in the evaluation of the task relevance of what is remembered (Wagner et al., 2005, Cabeza et al., 2008, Vilberg and Rugg, 2008 and Shimamura, 2011). Importantly, the PRAM

framework assumes that the distinction between perceptual and reflective attention is orthogonal to the distinction between top-down and bottom-up attention (Chun et al., 2011 and Corbetta and Shulman, 2002). Thus, efforts to compare control mechanisms for perceptual and reflective information should attempt to equate whether attention is directed to the task stimuli in a top-down or bottom-up manner. Studies to date typically relied on top-down manipulations (Nee and Jonides, 2009, Henseler et al., 2011 and Roth et al., 2009). It would

be helpful to introduce stimuli that capture attention in a Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase bottom-up manner to assess the extent to which a common ventral network is engaged in both perceptual and reflective tasks. That is, it would be useful to directly compare four conditions: top-down and bottom-up attentional conditions in both perceptual and reflective tasks. Perception and reflection both need selective mechanisms to resolve interference. Perception requires focusing on task-relevant information from among perceptually present task-irrelevant information. Perceptual competition makes it more difficult to find a T among Ls than among Os in visual search and can even produce quite dramatic examples of blindness to unattended information (Simons and Chabris, 1999; reviewed in Marois and Ivanoff, 2005). Resolution of competition (successful selection) occurs when goals bias activation in favor of goal relevant features (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). During perceptual identification, the strength of sensory evidence for a target can be measured by the strength of activity within a cortical region for the target category.