Highlights•In theory, priority maps may be used to guide saccades and covert
attention.•Brain areas LIP, FEF and SC have each been described as a priority map.•We …

The polyvagal collection of hypotheses is based upon five essential premises, as stated by
its author (Porges, 2011). Polyvagal conjectures rest on a primary assumption that brainstem …

Visual stimuli can evoke complex behavioral responses, but the underlying streams of
neural activity in mammalian brains are difficult to follow because of their size. Here, I review …

Selective attention is central to cognition. Dramatic advances have been made in
understanding the neural circuits that mediate selective attention. Forebrain networks, most …

Whether animals have subjective experiences about the content of their sensory input, ie,
whether they are aware of stimuli, is a notoriously difficult question to answer. If …

For animals to survive, they must interact with their environment, taking in sensory
information and making appropriate motor responses. Early on during vertebrate evolution …

The superior colliculus is a conserved sensorimotor structure that integrates visual and other
sensory information to drive reflexive behaviors. Although the evidence for this is strong and …

Attention describes the ability to selectively process a particular aspect of the environment at
the expense of others. Despite the significance of selective processing, the types and …

Which animals have conscious experiences? Many different, diverse and unrelated
behaviors and cognitive capacities have been proposed as tests of the presence of …

Accumulating evidence is supporting the hypothesis that our selective attention is a
manifestation of mechanisms that evolved early in evolution and are shared by many …