Selective attention and response control following damage to the human pulvinar

We report results from selective attention studies on a group of patients with focal lesion to the pulvinar. Our results do not seem compatible with some of the dominant characterizations of the pulvinar, including theories that the pulvinar is critical for contralateral filtering and that it plays an important role in allocating visual attention to the contralateral field. Instead, we find that the pulvinar is involved in contralateral response activation, especially under conditions of response competition, and contralateral spatial coding of visual features. The pulvinar appears to be involved both in binding a stimulus representation to a response, and in binding visual features to coherent representations of visual objects.