Nakahara H, Wu S, Amari S
RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, 351-0198, Japan.
Neural Comput. 2001 Sep;13(9):2031-47. doi: 10.1162/089976601750399290.
This study investigates the influence of attention modulation on neural tuning functions. It has been shown in experiments that attention modulation alters neural tuning curves. Attention has been considered at least to serve to resolve limiting capacities and to increase the sensitivity to attended stimulus, while the exact functions of attention are still under debate. Inspired by recent experimental results on attention modulation, we investigate the influence of changes in the height and base rate of the tuning curve on the encoding accuracy, using the Fisher information. Under an assumption of stimulus-conditional independence of neural responses, we derive explicit conditions that determine when the height and base rate should be increased or decreased to improve encoding accuracy. Notably, a decrease in the tuning height and base rate can improve the encoding accuracy in some cases. Our theoretical results can predict the effective size of attention modulation on the neural population with respect to encoding accuracy. We discuss how our method can be used quantitatively to evaluate different aspects of attention function.
本研究调查了注意力调制对神经调谐函数的影响。实验表明，注意力调制会改变神经调谐曲线。注意力至少被认为有助于解决有限容量问题并提高对被关注刺激的敏感性，而注意力的确切功能仍在争论中。受近期关于注意力调制的实验结果启发，我们使用费希尔信息研究调谐曲线的高度和基础率变化对编码准确性的影响。在神经反应的刺激条件独立性假设下，我们得出了明确的条件，这些条件决定了何时应增加或降低高度和基础率以提高编码准确性。值得注意的是，在某些情况下，调谐高度和基础率的降低可以提高编码准确性。我们的理论结果可以预测注意力调制对神经群体编码准确性的有效大小。我们讨论了如何定量地使用我们的方法来评估注意力功能的不同方面。
