ReviewAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences2015
The what, where, and why of priority maps and their interactions with visual working memory.
Review in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed.
- Do we remember templates better so that we can reject distractors better?Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Trial
- Eccentricity Constrains Spatial Working Memory Fidelity: Evidence for the Cortical Maps Hypothesis.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Past and present goals are represented concurrently during visual search.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Dorsal Posterior Parietal Cortex Lesions Disrupt Spatial- but Not Motor-Based Inhibition.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Avoiding the dichotomy between endogenous and exogenous attention: Selective attention as an attentional priority map fed by multiple interacting attentional signals.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- The role of event understanding in guiding attentional selection in real-world scenes: The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT).Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- ERP evidence of attentional selection outside of effective oculomotor range.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Saccade endpoints reflect attentional templates in visual search: Evidence from feature distribution learning.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Higher baseline alpha power is associated with faster responses in visual search.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- It's about location, location, location: Absolute and relative stimulus positions in action control.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Guided visual search is associated with target boosting and distractor suppression in early visual cortex.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The control of overt and covert attention across two nodes of the attention-control network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Object spatial certainty as a measure of spatial variability and its influence on attention.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Neural mechanisms of learned suppression uncovered by probing the hidden attentional priority map.eLife · 2025Article
- Exogenous spatial attention is functional in paralytic strabismics.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Vision toolkit part 3. Scanpaths and derived representations for gaze behavior characterization: a review.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Review
- Urgency enforces stimulus-driven action across spatial and numerical cognitive control tasks.PloS one · 2025Article
- Habituation in Predictability-Modulations of Stimulus-Response Binding.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- The rise and fall of durable color-induced attentional bias.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Priority maps are winner-take-all neural mechanisms thought to guide the allocation of covert and overt attention. Here, we go beyond this standard definition and argue that priority maps play a much broader role in controlling goal-directed behavior. We start by defining what priority maps are and where they might be found in the brain; we then ask why they exist-the function that they serve. We propose that this function is to communicate a goal state to the different effector systems, thereby guiding behavior. Within this framework, we speculate on how priority maps interact with visual working memory and introduce our common source hypothesis, the suggestion that this goal state is maintained in visual working memory and used to construct all of the priority maps controlling the various motor systems. Finally, we look ahead and suggest questions about priority maps that should be asked next.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.