Harvard Medical School Department of Neurobiology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Neuron. 2011 Jun 23;70(6):1192-204. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.04.029.
Visual attention affects both perception and neuronal responses. Whether the same neuronal mechanisms mediate spatial attention, which improves perception of attended locations, and nonspatial forms of attention has been a subject of considerable debate. Spatial and feature attention have similar effects on individual neurons. Because visual cortex is retinotopically organized, however, spatial attention can comodulate local neuronal populations, whereas feature attention generally requires more selective modulation. We compared the effects of feature and spatial attention on local and spatially separated populations by recording simultaneously from dozens of neurons in both hemispheres of V4. Feature and spatial attention affect the activity of local populations similarly, modulating both firing rates and correlations between pairs of nearby neurons. However, whereas spatial attention appears to act on local populations, feature attention is coordinated across hemispheres. Our results are consistent with a unified attentional mechanism that can modulate the responses of arbitrary subgroups of neurons.
视觉注意力会影响感知和神经元反应。同样的神经元机制是否介导空间注意力，从而提高对注意位置的感知，以及非空间形式的注意力，一直是一个相当有争议的话题。空间和特征注意力对单个神经元有相似的影响。然而，由于视觉皮层是按照视网膜组织的，因此空间注意力可以共同调节局部神经元群体，而特征注意力通常需要更有选择性的调节。我们通过同时记录 V4 左右半球数十个神经元，比较了特征和空间注意力对局部和空间分离群体的影响。特征和空间注意力对局部群体的活动有相似的影响，调节了神经元对的放电率和相关性。然而，空间注意力似乎作用于局部群体，而特征注意力则在半球间协调。我们的结果与一个统一的注意力机制一致，该机制可以调节任意子组神经元的反应。
