The lateral intraparietal area as a salience map: the representation of abrupt onset, stimulus motion, and task relevance.

Neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of the monkey represent salient stimuli. They respond to recently flashed stimuli that enter their receptive fields by virtue of saccades better than they respond to stable, behaviorally irrelevant stimuli brought into their receptive fields by saccades. They respond transiently to abrupt motion onsets, but have no directional selectivity. They respond to stable stimuli that are the targets for saccadic eye movements, but far less before the same saccades without stimuli. LIP is important in the attentional mechanisms preceding the choice of saccade target rather than in the intention to generate the saccade itself.