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Exogenous attention, the process that makes external salient stimuli pop-out of a visual scene, is essential for survival. How attention-capturing events modulate human brain processing remains unclear. Here we show how the psychological construct of exogenous attention gradually emerges over large-scale gradients in the human cortex, by analyzing activity from 1,403 intracortical contacts implanted in 28 individuals, while they performed an exogenous attention task. The timing, location and task-relevance of attentional events defined a spatiotemporal gradient of three neural clusters, which mapped onto cortical gradients and presented a hierarchy of timescales. Visual attributes modulated neural activity at one end of the gradient, while at the other end it reflected the upcoming response timing, with attentional effects occurring at the intersection of visual and response signals. These findings challenge multi-step models of attention, and suggest that frontoparietal networks, which process sequential stimuli as separate events sharing the same location, drive exogenous attention phenomena such as inhibition of return., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The literature suggests that neglect patients not only show impairments in directing attention toward the left, contralesional space, but also present with perseverative behavior. Moreover, previous studies described re‐fixations during visual search tasks, and interpreted this finding as an impairment of spatial working memory. The aim of the present study was to study re‐fixations and perseverations (i.e., recurrent re‐fixations to same locations) during free visual exploration, a task with high ecological validity. We hypothesized that: (1) neglect patient would perform re‐fixations more frequently than healthy controls within the right hemispace; and, (2) the re‐fixation behavior of neglect patients would be characterized by perseverative fixations. To test these hypotheses, we assessed 22 neglect patients and 23 healthy controls, measuring their eye movements during free exploration of naturalistic pictures. The results showed that neglect patients tend to re‐fixate locations within the ipsilesional hemispace when they freely explore naturalistic pictures. Importantly, the saliency of discrete locations within the pictures has a stronger influence on fixation behavior within the contralesional than within the ipsilesional hemispace in neglect patients. Finally, the results indicated that, for re‐fixations, saliency plays a more important role within the contralesional than the ipsilesional hemispace. Moreover, we found evidence that re‐fixation behavior of neglect patients is characterized by frequent recurrent re‐fixations back to the same spatial locations which may be interpreted as perseverations. Hence, with the present study, we could better elucidate the mechanism leading to re‐fixations and perseverative behavior during free visual exploration in neglect patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]