This is chapter 5 of the textbook Understanding Vision: theory, models, and data Oxford University Press, 2014. You can read it in the sample chapters of the book
Abstract: This chapter gives a full account of the theoretical development and experimental investigations of the hypothesis that the primary visual cortex (V1) creates a bottom-up saliency map to guide visual attention exogenously. The chapter details the background motivations, theoretical formulation, and experimental tests of the hypothesis, as well as a neural circuit model of the primary visual cortex for the underlying neural mechanisms. The hypothesis links two bodies of data: one is of physiological data on intracortical interactions in V1 and the consequent contextual influences in V1 neural responses; the other is of behavioral data on attention capture, visual search, and visual segmentation. In light of the saliency map in V1, the chapter additionally discusses the roles of the extrastriate visual cortices, contrasts the roles of the central and peripheral visual fields, and reflects on the dissociation between attention capture and perceptual awareness.
Keywords: saliency, V1, primary visual cortex, visual search, saliency map, contextual influences, neural circuit model, extrastriate cortices.
Its figures in a pptx file
A video intro lecture