Journal of cognitive neuroscience
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The ventral attentional network (VAN) is thought to drive "stimulus driven attention" [e.g., Asplund, C. L., Todd, J. J., Snyder, A. ⋯ Journal of Neurophysiology, 90, 3384-3397, 2003] to be more active when task-relevant stimuli had not supported task performance in a previous trial than when they had. Investigations of the ventral visual system suggest that this effect is more reliably driven by trial history preserved within the VAN than that preserved within the visual system per se. We conclude that VAN maintains its interactions with top-down stimulus biases and bottom-up stimulation across time, allowing previous experience with the stimulus environment to influence attentional biases under current circumstances.