Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, Davis, California 95618
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, California 95616.
eNeuro. 2023 Jun 12;10(6). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0258-22.2023. Print 2023 Jun.
Studies of voluntary visual spatial attention have used attention-directing cues, such as arrows, to induce or instruct observers to focus selective attention on relevant locations in visual space to detect or discriminate subsequent target stimuli. In everyday vision, however, voluntary attention is influenced by a host of factors, most of which are quite different from the laboratory paradigms that use attention-directing cues. These factors include priming, experience, reward, meaning, motivations, and high-level behavioral goals. Attention that is endogenously directed in the absence of external attention-directing cues has been referred to as "self-initiated attention" or, as in our prior work, as "willed attention" where volunteers decide where to attend in response to a prompt to do so. Here, we used a novel paradigm that eliminated external influences (i.e., attention-directing cues and prompts) about where and/or when spatial attention should be directed. Using machine learning decoding methods, we showed that the well known lateralization of EEG alpha power during spatial attention was also present during purely self-generated attention. By eliminating explicit cues or prompts that affect the allocation of voluntary attention, this work advances our understanding of the neural correlates of attentional control and provides steps toward the development of EEG-based brain-computer interfaces that tap into human intentions.
对自愿的视觉空间注意力的研究使用了注意导向线索（如箭头）来诱导或指示观察者将选择性注意集中在视觉空间中的相关位置，以检测或辨别随后的目标刺激。然而，在日常视觉中，自愿注意受到许多因素的影响，其中大多数因素与使用注意导向线索的实验室范式截然不同。这些因素包括启动、经验、奖励、意义、动机和高级行为目标。在没有外部注意导向线索的情况下自主引导的注意力被称为“自我启动注意力”，或者如我们之前的工作中所说的“有意注意”，志愿者根据提示决定将注意力集中在何处。在这里，我们使用了一种新的范式，消除了关于空间注意力应该指向何处和/或何时的外部影响（即注意导向线索和提示）。使用机器学习解码方法，我们表明，在空间注意力期间 EEG 阿尔法功率的众所周知的侧化也存在于纯粹的自我产生的注意力期间。通过消除影响自愿注意力分配的明确线索或提示，这项工作推进了我们对注意力控制的神经相关的理解，并为开发基于 EEG 的脑机接口提供了步骤，这些接口可以利用人类的意图。
