Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824.
J Neurosci. 2013 Oct 16;33(42):16606-16. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1780-13.2013.
Humans can voluntarily attend to a variety of visual attributes to serve behavioral goals. Voluntary attention is believed to be controlled by a network of dorsal frontoparietal areas. However, it is unknown how neural signals representing behavioral relevance (attentional priority) for different attributes are organized in this network. Computational studies have suggested that a hierarchical organization reflecting the similarity structure of the task demands provides an efficient and flexible neural representation. Here we examined the structure of attentional priority using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were cued to attend to location, color, or motion direction within the same stimulus. We found a hierarchical structure emerging in frontoparietal areas, such that multivoxel patterns for attending to spatial locations were most distinct from those for attending to features, and the latter were further clustered into different dimensions (color vs motion). These results provide novel evidence for the organization of the attentional control signals at the level of distributed neural activity. The hierarchical organization provides a computationally efficient scheme to support flexible top-down control.
人类可以主动关注各种视觉属性以服务于行为目标。人们认为，主动注意受背侧额顶叶网络的控制。然而，目前尚不清楚代表不同属性的行为相关性（注意优先级）的神经信号在该网络中是如何组织的。计算研究表明，反映任务需求相似性结构的分层组织为神经表示提供了一种高效灵活的方式。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像研究了注意力优先级的结构。参与者被提示在同一个刺激中注意位置、颜色或运动方向。我们发现额顶叶区域出现了一种分层结构，例如，注意空间位置的多体素模式与注意特征的模式差异最大，而后者进一步聚类成不同的维度（颜色与运动）。这些结果为分布式神经活动水平上的注意力控制信号的组织提供了新的证据。分层组织为支持灵活的自上而下控制提供了一种计算高效的方案。
