memory, more specifically, from the prefrontal cortex. Neural Mechanisms There are two major neural pathways that process the information in the visual field; the ventral stream and the dorsal stream. The two pathways run in parallel and are both working simultaneously. The ventral stream is important for object recognition and often referred to as the “what” system of the brain; it projects to the inferior temporal cortex. The dorsal stream is important for spatial perception and performance and is referred to as the “where” system which projects to the posterior parietal cortex. According to the biased competition theory, an individual's visual system has limited capacity to process information about multiple objects at any given time. For example, if an individual was presented with two stimuli (objects) and was asked to identify attributes of each object at the same time, the individual's performance would be worse in comparison to if the objects were presented separately. This suggests multiple objects presented simultaneously in the visual field will compete for neural representation due to limited processing resources. Single cell recording studies conducted by Kastner and Ungerleider examined the neural mechanisms behind the biased competition theory. In their experiment the size of the receptive field's (RF) of neurons within the visual cortex were examined. A single visual stimulus was presented alone in a neuron's RF, followed with another stimulus presented simultaneously within the same RF. The single ‘effective’ stimuli produced a low firing rate, whereas the two stimuli presented together produced a high firing rate. The response to the paired stimuli was reduced. This suggests that when two stimuli are presented together within a neuron's RF, the stimuli are processed in a mutually suppressive manner, rather than being processed independently. This suppression process, according to Kastner and Ungerleider, occurs when two stimuli are presented together because they compete for neural representation, due to limited cognitive processing capacity. The RF experiment suggests that as the number of objects increase, the information available for each object will decrease due to increased neural workload (suppression), and decreased cognitive capacity. In order for an object in the visual field or RF be efficiently processed, there needs to be a way to bias these neurological resources towards the object. Attention prioritizes task relevant objects, biasing this process. For example, this bias can be towards an object which is currently attended to in the visual field or RF, or towards