Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
Nat Commun. 2019 Aug 2;10(1):3500. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11448-7.
Attention can both enhance and suppress cortical sensory representations. However, changing sensory representations can also be detrimental to behavior. Behavioral consequences can be avoided by flexibly changing sensory readout, while leaving the representations unchanged. Here, we asked human observers to attend to and report about either one of two features which control the visibility of motion while making concurrent measurements of cortical activity with BOLD imaging (fMRI). We extend a well-established linking model to account for the relationship between these measurements and find that changes in sensory representation during directed attention are insufficient to explain perceptual reports. Adding a flexible downstream readout is necessary to best explain our data. Such a model implies that observers should be able to recover information about ignored features, a prediction which we confirm behaviorally. Thus, flexible readout is a critical component of the cortical implementation of human adaptive behavior.
注意力既可以增强也可以抑制皮质感觉代表。然而，改变感觉代表也可能对行为不利。通过灵活地改变感觉读出而不改变代表，可以避免行为后果。在这里，我们要求人类观察者在进行大脑活动的血氧水平依赖功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量的同时，注意并报告控制运动可见性的两个特征中的一个。我们扩展了一个成熟的链接模型来解释这些测量之间的关系，发现定向注意力期间的感觉代表变化不足以解释感知报告。添加灵活的下游读出是解释我们数据的必要条件。这样的模型意味着观察者应该能够恢复关于被忽略特征的信息，我们在行为上验证了这一预测。因此，灵活的读出是人类自适应行为的皮质实现的关键组成部分。
