Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montréal, QC H3G1Y6, Canada.
Neuron. 2011 Apr 14;70(1):141-52. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.02.041.
Neurons in the primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) filter attended [corrected] targets distinctly from distracters through their response rates. The extent to which this ability correlates with the organism's performance, and the neural processes underlying it, remain unclear. We trained monkeys to attend to a visual target that differed in rank along a color-ordinal scale from that of a distracter. The animals' performance at focusing attention on the target and filtering out the distracter improved as ordinal distance between the stimuli increased. Importantly, dlPFC neurons also improved their filtering performance with increasing ordinal target-distracter distance; they built up their response rate in anticipation of the target-distracter onset, and then units encoding target representations increased their firing rate by similar amounts, whereas units encoding distracter representations gradually suppressed their rates as the interstimulus ordinal distance increased. These results suggest that attentional-filtering performance in primates relies upon dlPFC neurons' ability to suppress distracter representations.
灵长类动物背外侧前额皮质（dlPFC）中的神经元通过反应率将注意到的[校正后]目标与干扰物明显区分开来。这种能力与生物体表现的相关性以及其背后的神经过程仍不清楚。我们训练猴子关注视觉目标，该目标在颜色顺序标度上与干扰物的颜色顺序标度不同。随着刺激之间的顺序距离增加，动物专注于目标和过滤干扰物的表现得到改善。重要的是，dlPFC 神经元也随着目标-干扰物顺序距离的增加而提高了它们的过滤性能；它们在目标-干扰物出现之前增加了反应率，然后编码目标表示的单元以相似的幅度增加了它们的发射率，而编码干扰物表示的单元则随着刺激之间的顺序距离的增加逐渐抑制了它们的速率。这些结果表明，灵长类动物的注意力过滤性能依赖于 dlPFC 神经元抑制干扰物表示的能力。
