Attentional effects of FEF
(from January)
Tirin Moore and Katherine Armstrong have showed that stimulating the frontal eye fields (FEF) can cause neurons in V4 to become more responsive to stimuli. It was known that stimulating FEF can cause saccades, but this shows that even if you stimulate too weakly to cause a saccade, you still enhance the responsiveness of V4 neurons which target the visual location corresponding to your FEF stimulation.
An earlier behavioral study has already shown that weak FEF stimulation can improve visual performance for the corresponding visual location.
Tirin Moore, Katherine M. Armstrong.
Selective gating of visual signals by microstimulation of frontal cortex.Nature 421, 370-373 (23 Jan 2003) Letters to Editor.