Speaker: Dr. Michael Silver School of Optometry and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, USA Functional networks underlying visual spatial attention in the human brain In humans, allocation of attention to a particular location increases accuracy and decreases reaction time for detecting targets presented at the attended location. The neural bases of this enhancement of perception by visual spatial attention are poorly understood. We employed brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI) to record brain activity associated with visual spatial attention in several cerebral cortical areas. Coherency analysis was used to measure the strength of coupling and the temporal delays between all possible pairs of recorded areas. This allows the generation of a “neural circuit diagram” of attention networks in the human brain and characterization of the flow of information within these networks.