Abstract
A visual item in sharp contrast with its neighboring items in a simple feature, such as color or orientation, automatically captures attention. Although cortical area V1 signals such simple feature contrasts, it is unclear whether these signals are utilized for saliency effects in behavior and whether they are enhanced by training. By training monkeys to detect a short bar in various degrees of orientation contrast with uniformly oriented background bars, we show that the feature contrast signals in V1, which start from the beginning of neuronal responses, are correlated with the detection performance and are therefore perceptual saliency signals. Training makes the early saliency signals more behaviorally correlated, consistent with more reflexive and less effortful task performance after training.
