Mohn Jennifer L, Downer Joshua D, O'Connor Kevin N, Johnson Jeffrey S, Sutter Mitchell L
Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, California.
Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis, California.
J Neurophysiol. 2021 May 1;125(5):1920-1937. doi: 10.1152/jn.00406.2020. Epub 2021 Mar 31.
Selective attention is necessary to sift through, form a coherent percept of, and make behavioral decisions on the vast amount of information present in most sensory environments. How and where selective attention is employed in cortex and how this perceptual information then informs the relevant behavioral decisions is still not well understood. Studies probing selective attention and decision-making in visual cortex have been enlightening as to how sensory attention might work in that modality; whether or not similar mechanisms are employed in auditory attention is not yet clear. Therefore, we trained rhesus macaques on a feature-selective attention task, where they switched between reporting changes in temporal (amplitude modulation, AM) and spectral (carrier bandwidth) features of a broadband noise stimulus. We investigated how the encoding of these features by single neurons in primary (A1) and secondary (middle lateral belt, ML) auditory cortex was affected by the different attention conditions. We found that neurons in A1 and ML showed mixed selectivity to the sound and task features. We found no difference in AM encoding between the attention conditions. We found that choice-related activity in both A1 and ML neurons shifts between attentional conditions. This finding suggests that choice-related activity in auditory cortex does not simply reflect motor preparation or action and supports the relationship between reported choice-related activity and the decision and perceptual process. We recorded from primary and secondary auditory cortex while monkeys performed a nonspatial feature attention task. Both areas exhibited rate-based choice-related activity. The manifestation of choice-related activity was attention dependent, suggesting that choice-related activity in auditory cortex does not simply reflect arousal or motor influences but relates to the specific perceptual choice.
在大多数感官环境中，存在大量信息，选择性注意对于筛选这些信息、形成连贯的感知并做出行为决策是必要的。目前，人们仍未完全理解在皮层中如何以及在何处运用选择性注意，以及这种感知信息如何影响相关的行为决策。对视觉皮层中的选择性注意和决策进行研究，有助于了解感觉注意在该模态下的工作方式；然而，尚不清楚听觉注意是否采用类似机制。因此，我们训练恒河猴执行一项特征选择性注意任务，在该任务中，它们在报告宽带噪声刺激的时间（幅度调制，AM）和频谱（载波带宽）特征变化之间进行切换。我们研究了初级（A1）和次级（中侧带，ML）听觉皮层中单个神经元对这些特征的编码如何受到不同注意条件的影响。我们发现，A1和ML中的神经元对声音和任务特征表现出混合选择性。我们发现不同注意条件下的AM编码没有差异。我们发现，A1和ML神经元中与选择相关的活动在注意条件之间发生变化。这一发现表明，听觉皮层中与选择相关的活动并非简单地反映运动准备或动作，而是支持了所报告的与选择相关的活动与决策和感知过程之间的关系。我们在猴子执行非空间特征注意任务时，记录了初级和次级听觉皮层的活动。两个区域均表现出基于速率的与选择相关的活动。与选择相关的活动表现依赖于注意，这表明听觉皮层中与选择相关的活动并非简单地反映唤醒或运动影响，而是与特定的感知选择有关。
