Recently I was at a convention for neuroscience and there was a talk given on our abilities to weigh values at different points. The main speaker, Dr. Louie Kenway, is a cognitive neuroscientist at NYU focusing his research on normalization in the parietal cortex. Dr. Kenway discussed the area in the parietal cortex known as lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), an area in the parietal cortex that responds to both general visual stimuli and saccade eye movements (eye movements that jump). He began to show that in this area, the brain has an ability to weight the values of the saccadic eye movements. Dr. Kenway's lab focuses on value in a relative term based in the parietal cortex similar to that of somatosensory areas.
LIP neurons respond to a specific visual receptive field, but also encorporate the surrounding context and previous saccades. So, individual parietal neurons need the response of neighboring neurons to contextualize the saccade movement. Additionally, inhibition by the receptive field neurons not being used enhances the strength and response of the receptive field neurons which are active, similar to that of general visual processing giving value and different weights. What was interesting is that as the number of alternative distractors in neighboring visual fields increased the value firing in the LIP neurons was not as strong.
The talk was quite fascinating as it encorporated both physiological and cognitive elements. My curiosity was to that of dislexia. If this applied to visual stimuli in general, perhaps there is some problems in LIP neurons of those with dislexia.
For anyone who's interested, I'm posting a link to his original research. It was tough to get through, but quite interesting.
http://www.jneurosci.org.flagship.luc.edu/content/31/29/10627.full.pdf
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