Hu Qiyi, Zheng Zhiyan, Sui Xiaohong, Li Liming, Chai Xinyu, Chen Yao
School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Front Cell Neurosci. 2022 Jun 16;16:838049. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2022.838049. eCollection 2022.
The influence of spatial attention on neural interactions has been revealed even in early visual information processing stages. It resolves the process of competing for sensory information about objects perceived as targets and distractors. However, the attentional modulation of the interaction between pairs of neurons with non-overlapping receptive fields (RFs) is not well known. Here, we investigated the activity of anatomically distant neurons in two behaving monkeys' primary visual cortex (V1), when they performed a spatial attention task detecting color change. We compared attentional modulation from the perspective of spike count correlations and Granger causality among simple and complex cells. An attention-related increase in spike count correlations and a decrease in Granger causality were found. The results showed that spatial attention significantly influenced only the interactions between rather than within simple and complex cells. Furthermore, we found that the attentional modulation of neuronal interactions changed with neuronal pairs' preferred directions differences. Thus, we found that spatial attention increased the functional communications and competing connectivities when attending to the neurons' RFs, which impacts the interactions only between simple and complex cells. Our findings enrich the model of simple and complex cells and further understand the way that attention influences the neurons' activities.
即使在早期视觉信息处理阶段，空间注意力对神经交互的影响也已被揭示。它解决了关于被视为目标和干扰物的物体的感觉信息竞争过程。然而，具有不重叠感受野（RFs）的神经元对之间相互作用的注意力调制尚不清楚。在这里，我们研究了两只行为猴子初级视觉皮层（V1）中解剖学上距离较远的神经元在执行检测颜色变化的空间注意力任务时的活动。我们从简单细胞和复杂细胞之间的尖峰计数相关性和格兰杰因果关系的角度比较了注意力调制。发现尖峰计数相关性与注意力相关的增加以及格兰杰因果关系的减少。结果表明，空间注意力仅显著影响简单细胞和复杂细胞之间而非其内部的相互作用。此外，我们发现神经元相互作用的注意力调制随神经元对的偏好方向差异而变化。因此，我们发现空间注意力在关注神经元的感受野时增加了功能通信和竞争性连接，这仅影响简单细胞和复杂细胞之间的相互作用。我们的发现丰富了简单细胞和复杂细胞的模型，并进一步理解了注意力影响神经元活动的方式。
