Attending to features inside and outside the spotlight of attention.

Previous studies in monkeys and humans have revealed neural correlates and perceptual consequences of feature-based attention. In this issue of Neuron, two brain-imaging studies from Serences and Boynton and Liu et al. bridge the gap between single neurons and behavior by demonstrating a highly functional attention system that acts on neural representations of our visual world enhancing the processing of the currently attended set of features at the expense of information about less relevant aspects.