PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Douglas A Ruff AU - Marlene R Cohen TI - Simultaneous multi-area recordings suggest a novel hypothesis about how attention improves performance AID - 10.1101/372888 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 372888 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/24/372888.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/24/372888.full AB - Visual attention dramatically improves subjects' ability to see and also modulates the responses of neurons in every known visual and oculomotor area, but whether those modulations can account for perceptual improvements remains unclear. We measured the relationship between populations of visual neurons, oculomotor neurons, and behavior, and found that neither of the two prominent hypothesized neuronal mechanisms underlying attention (which concern changes in information coding and the way sensory information is read out) accounted for the observed behavioral improvements. Instead, our results are more consistent with the novel hypothesis that attention reshapes the representation of attended stimuli to more effectively influence behavior. Our results suggest a path toward understanding the neural underpinnings of perception and cognition in health and disease by analyzing neuronal responses in ways that are constrained by behavior and interactions between brain areas.