Research has implicated frontal granular area 8Av, in the caudal middle frontal gyrus in the human brain and in the periarcuate region in macaque monkeys, in selectively allocating attention to a visual target from among distractors based on previously learned rules; that is, if stimulus A is presented, select response X, but if stimulus B is presented, select response Y. Recent functional neuroimaging in healthy human participants has only examined this cognitive ability to guide decisions based on internalized rules when the behavioural output has a spatial component. The aim of the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to examine the specific role of area 8Av in the control of selective attention to visual stimuli in the environment that are independent of their spatial location. Twelve healthy, right-handed subjects (six female, mean age 25 years, range: 20-31 years) were trained the day before scanning on a nonspatial visual conditional associative task and a control task that did not require the covert allocation of visual attention. The group-level analyses revealed that the conditional selection of nonspatial visual stimuli based on previously learned rules recruited a region in the left hemisphere in the posterior middle frontal gyrus within area 8Av at the border of area 6. The present fMRI study provides novel evidence for the involvement of the posterior middle frontal gyrus, at the intersection of area 8Av with area 6, in healthy human subjects when allocating visual attention to nonspatial exteroceptive stimuli.