Farbod Kia Saba, Åstrand Elaine, Ibos Guilhem, Ben Hamed Suliann
Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, CNRS-UMR 5229, Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, 67 Bd. Pinel, 69675 Bron Cedex, France.
J Physiol Paris. 2011 Jan-Jun;105(1-3):115-22. doi: 10.1016/j.jphysparis.2011.07.015. Epub 2011 Oct 2.
While sensory and motor systems have attracted most of the research effort in the field neuroprosthetics, little attention has been devoted to higher order cortical processes. Here, we propose a first step in the direction of applying neural decoding to the study and manipulation of visuospatial attention, an endogenous process at the interface between sensory and motor functions. To this aim, we investigate whether the offline activity of a population of non-human primate frontal eye field neurons (FEF) in response to an endogenous cue can be readout on a trial by trial basis to provide a precise description of the cue's attributes, namely, its location and identity, but also the allocation of attention following its interpretation. Using a linear decoder, we reach up to 86% correct predictions for the different decoded variables, including the spatial allocation of endogenous attention. We show that the decoding performance drops on incorrect trials, indicating that cue encoding participates to the animal's behavioral performance. Last, we show that the temporal resolution of the decoding influences readout performance. These results are a strong indication of the feasibility of the readout of endogenous variables by standard decoding algorithms, on a suboptimal dataset. However, its validity remains to be proved in a real-time situation.
虽然感觉和运动系统吸引了神经假体领域的大部分研究精力，但高阶皮层过程却很少受到关注。在此，我们朝着将神经解码应用于视觉空间注意力的研究和操纵迈出了第一步，视觉空间注意力是一种处于感觉和运动功能之间界面的内源性过程。为此，我们研究了一群非人类灵长类动物额叶眼区神经元（FEF）对内源性线索的离线活动是否可以逐次读出，以提供线索属性的精确描述，即其位置和身份，以及线索解读后注意力的分配情况。使用线性解码器，我们对不同的解码变量，包括内源性注意力的空间分配，做出了高达86%的正确预测。我们表明，在错误试验中解码性能会下降，这表明线索编码参与了动物的行为表现。最后，我们表明解码的时间分辨率会影响读出性能。这些结果有力地表明，在一个次优数据集上，通过标准解码算法读出内源性变量是可行的。然而，其在实时情况下的有效性仍有待证明。
