The amplitude and latency of the earliest signal in V1 encode bottom-up saliency by feature conjunction

• Eye-of-origin information, invisible to the SC, elicits an early saliency signal in V1 within 50–100 ms. • Combined feature contrast enhances V1 saliency responses in a nonlinear fashion. • The latency and amplitude of V1 saliency responses predict behavioral detection performance The neural origin of bottom-up saliency for exogenous attention remains highly controversial. In this study, we investigated whether the earliest activity in the primary visual cortex (V1) encodes saliency signals defined by the eye-of-origin and feature-conjunction information. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from the human occipital cortex revealed early responses to eye-of-origin (E) and/or orientation (O) singletons, with larger response amplitudes to the double-feature (EO) singletons. The short onset latency (58–70 ms) and polarity reversal of the responses indicate an origin in the early visual areas, particularly V1. Importantly, the latency and amplitude of these responses predicted behavioral detection performance. Together, these findings suggest that the timing and amplitude of the earliest signals in V1 represent the saliency of combined feature contrasts for bottom-up attention. These signals unlikely originate from projections of other proposed source areas of saliency, due to the scarcity of necessary monocular neurons to process eye-of-origin information.