Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia.
Exp Brain Res. 2013 Jul;228(3):365-76. doi: 10.1007/s00221-013-3569-2. Epub 2013 May 29.
When two brief stimuli are presented in rapid succession, our ability to attend and recognize the second stimulus is impaired if our attentional resources are devoted to processing the first. Such inability (termed the "attentional blink" in human studies) arises around 200-500 ms following the onset of the first stimulus. We trained two monkeys on a delayed-match-to-sample task where both the location and orientation of two successively presented grating patches had to be matched. When the delay between the two gratings was varied, monkey's behavioral performance (d') was affected in a way that was analogous to the attentional blink in humans. Furthermore, a subset of neurons in the monkey's lateral intraparietal area, known to be crucial in the control of attention, closely followed the variation in d', even on occasions when d' followed an atypical pattern. Our results provide the first behavioral demonstration of an attentional bottleneck in the macaque of a type similar to the human attentional blink as well as a possible single-neuron correlate of the phenomenon.
当两个短暂的刺激快速连续呈现时，如果我们的注意力资源用于处理第一个刺激，那么我们注意和识别第二个刺激的能力就会受到损害。这种能力下降（在人类研究中称为“注意瞬脱”）出现在第一个刺激开始后的 200-500 毫秒左右。我们在延迟匹配样本任务中对两只猴子进行了训练，在该任务中，两个相继呈现的光栅补丁的位置和方向都必须匹配。当两个光栅之间的延迟时间变化时，猴子的行为表现（d'）受到了类似于人类注意瞬脱的影响。此外，猴子顶内侧面区的一组神经元，已知在注意力控制中至关重要，即使在 d' 遵循非典型模式的情况下，也与 d' 的变化密切相关。我们的结果首次在猕猴中提供了类似于人类注意瞬脱的注意瓶颈的行为证据，以及该现象的可能的单个神经元相关性。
