Figure 1. Attention filters behaviorally-relevant information.

When viewing a complex natural scene (left), visual processing by a noisy neural system will necessarily result in an overall information loss. If your eyes were fixated on the center of the image, but you were directing attention to the temple nestled among the trees near the top, information about the attended temple would be selectively preserved from degradation by noisy neural processing such that, even at successively later stages of computation, information about the attended location and/or features of the image is still maintained, despite substantial loss of information about unattended components of the image (right panel).