Parietal Cortex and Attention

The parietal lobe forms about 20% of the human cerebral cortex and is divided into two major regions, the somatosensory cortex and the posterior parietal cortex. Posterior parietal cortex, located at the junction of multiple sensory regions, projects to several cortical and subcortical areas and is engaged in a host of cognitive operations. One such operation is selective attention, the process where by the input is filtered and a subset of the information is selected for preferential processing. Recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have provided a more fine-grained understanding of the relationship between brain and behavior in the domain of selective attention.