Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Western University, London, Ontario N6A 3K7, Canada.
Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada.
eNeuro. 2019 Apr 15;6(2). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0301-18.2019. eCollection 2019 Mar-Apr.
Lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) neurons signal the allocation of voluntary attention; however, the neural computations underlying this function remain unknown. To investigate this, we recorded from neuronal ensembles in the LPFC of two performing a visuospatial attention task. LPFC neural responses to a single stimulus were normalized when additional stimuli/distracters appeared across the visual field and were well-characterized by an averaging computation. Deploying attention toward an individual stimulus surrounded by distracters shifted neural activity from an averaging regime toward a regime similar to that when the attended stimulus was presented in isolation (winner-take-all; WTA). However, attentional modulation is both qualitatively and quantitatively dependent on a neuron's visuospatial tuning. Our results show that during attentive vision, LPFC neuronal ensemble activity can be robustly read out by downstream areas to generate motor commands, and/or fed back into sensory areas to filter out distracter signals in favor of target signals.
外侧前额叶皮层 (LPFC) 神经元信号发出了自愿注意力的分配；然而，这一功能的神经计算仍然未知。为了研究这一点，我们在两名参与者执行视觉空间注意任务时，从 LPFC 的神经元集合中进行了记录。当额外的刺激/分心物出现在视野中时，单个刺激的 LPFC 神经反应被归一化，并且可以通过平均计算很好地描述。将注意力集中在一个被分心物包围的单个刺激上，会将神经活动从平均状态转移到类似于注意力集中的刺激单独呈现时的状态（胜者全拿；WTA）。然而，注意力的调节在质量和数量上都依赖于神经元的视觉空间调谐。我们的结果表明，在注意力视觉期间，LPFC 神经元集合活动可以被下游区域可靠地读取，以生成运动命令，和/或反馈到感觉区域，以过滤掉分心物信号，有利于目标信号。
