Rawley Justin B, Constantinidis Christos
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1010, USA.
J Vis. 2010 Jan 27;10(1):12.1-16. doi: 10.1167/10.1.12.
The activity of neurons in the primate posterior parietal cortex reflects the location of visual stimuli relative to the eye, body, and world, and is modulated by selective attention and task rules. It is not known however how these effects interact with each other. To address this question, we recorded neuronal activity from area 7a of monkeys trained to perform two variants of a delayed match-to-sample task. The monkeys attended a spatial location defined in either spatiotopic (world-centered) or retinotopic (eye-centered) coordinates. We found neuronal responses to be remarkably plastic depending on the task. In contrast to previous studies using the simple version of the delayed match-to-sample task, we discovered that after training in a task where the locus of attention shifted during the trial, neural responses were typically enhanced for a match stimulus. Our results further revealed that responses were mostly enhanced for stimuli matching in spatiotopic coordinates, although the proportion of neurons modulated by either coordinate frame was influenced by the behavioral task executed.
灵长类动物后顶叶皮层中神经元的活动反映了视觉刺激相对于眼睛、身体和外部世界的位置，并受到选择性注意和任务规则的调节。然而，尚不清楚这些效应是如何相互作用的。为了解决这个问题，我们记录了经过训练执行延迟样本匹配任务两种变体的猴子7a区的神经元活动。猴子关注以空间拓扑（以世界为中心）或视网膜拓扑（以眼睛为中心）坐标定义的空间位置。我们发现神经元反应根据任务表现出显著的可塑性。与之前使用简单版本的延迟样本匹配任务的研究不同，我们发现，在训练了注意力焦点在试验过程中发生转移的任务后，匹配刺激的神经反应通常会增强。我们的结果进一步表明，尽管受两种坐标框架调节的神经元比例受所执行行为任务的影响，但对于在空间拓扑坐标中匹配的刺激，反应大多增强。
