Marmoset area MTC shows larger pre-saccadic neural enhancements than MT

The enhancement of neural encoding at the end location of a planned saccade is called pre-saccadic attention and occurs automatically with every saccade in visual foraging. In the visual cortex, pre-saccadic attention correlates with increased firing and gain increases of tuning curves for features like motion direction. While visual attention has been extensively studied in area MT, less is known about the adjacent areas, V4t and MST-lateral in macaques, collectively referred to as MTC in the marmoset monkey. Distinguishing these areas from MT in macaques is challenging because they are located within a sulcus, but the smooth cortex of the marmoset allows for clear delineation based on retinotopy. Here we asked if these areas differ in their attention modulation. Marmosets made saccades to random dot motion stimuli either placed within or outside a neuron’s receptive field. Pre-saccadic enhancements were found for saccades towards stimuli in the receptive field and were larger for area MTC than MT. While it is known that peripheral MST has larger attention effects than MT in the macaque, whether that holds for the parafoveal regions of MST-lateral was untested. Our results confirm that MTC (MST-lateral) shows larger attention effects than MT and demonstrates the similarity of attention modulation in the marmoset to the macaque.