Hajnal Márton Albert, Tran Duy, Szabó Zsombor, Albert Andrea, Safaryan Karen, Einstein Michael, Martelo Mauricio Vallejo, Polack Pierre-Olivier, Golshani Peyman, Orbán Gergő
Department of Computational Sciences, Wigner Research Center for Physics, Budapest, 1121, Hungary.
Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States.
bioRxiv. 2023 Oct 10:2023.10.10.561737. doi: 10.1101/2023.10.10.561737.
Attention is a cognitive faculty that selects part of a larger set of percepts, driven by cues such as stimulus saliency, internal goals or priors. The enhancement of the attended representation and inhibition of distractors have been proposed as potential neural mechanisms driving this selection process. Yet, how attention operates when the cue has to be internally constructed from conflicting stimuli, decision rules, and reward contingencies, is less understood. Here we recorded from populations of neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area implicated in ongoing error monitoring and correction during decision conflicts, in a challenging attention-shifting task. In this task, mice had to attend to the rewarded modality when presented identical auditory and visual stimuli in two contexts without direct external cues. In the ACC, the irrelevant stimulus continuously became less decodable than the relevant stimulus as the trial progressed to the decision point. This contrasted strongly with our previous findings in V1 where both relevant and irrelevant stimuli were equally decodable throughout the trial. Using analytical tools and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, we found that the linearly independent representation of stimulus modalities in ACC was well suited to context-gated suppression of a stimulus modality. We demonstrated that the feedback structure of lateral connections in the RNN consisted of excitatory interactions between cell ensembles representing the same modality and mutual inhibition between cell ensembles representing distinct stimulus modalities. Using this RNN model showing signatures of context-gated suppression, we predicted that the level of contextual modulation of individual neurons should be correlated with their relative responsiveness to the two stimulus modalities used in the task. We verified this prediction in recordings from ACC neurons but not from recordings from V1 neurons. Therefore, ACC effectively operates on low-dimensional neuronal subspaces to combine stimulus related information with internal cues to drive actions under conflict.
注意力是一种认知能力，它在诸如刺激显著性、内部目标或先验知识等线索的驱动下，从更大的一组感知中选择一部分。对被关注表征的增强和对干扰物的抑制被认为是驱动这一选择过程的潜在神经机制。然而，当线索必须从相互冲突的刺激、决策规则和奖励偶然性中内在构建时，注意力是如何运作的，目前还不太清楚。在这里，我们在一项具有挑战性的注意力转移任务中，记录了前扣带回皮质（ACC）中神经元群体的活动，该区域与决策冲突期间正在进行的错误监测和纠正有关。在这项任务中，当在没有直接外部线索的两种情境中呈现相同的听觉和视觉刺激时，小鼠必须关注有奖励的刺激方式。在ACC中，随着试验进展到决策点，无关刺激与相关刺激相比，其可解码性持续降低。这与我们之前在初级视觉皮层（V1）的发现形成了强烈对比，在V1中，相关和无关刺激在整个试验过程中都具有相同的可解码性。使用分析工具和循环神经网络（RNN）模型，我们发现ACC中刺激模态的线性独立表征非常适合对刺激模态进行情境门控抑制。我们证明，RNN中侧向连接的反馈结构由代表相同模态的细胞集合之间的兴奋性相互作用以及代表不同刺激模态的细胞集合之间的相互抑制组成。使用这个显示情境门控抑制特征的RNN模型，我们预测单个神经元的情境调制水平应该与其对任务中使用的两种刺激模态的相对反应性相关。我们在ACC神经元的记录中验证了这一预测，但在V1神经元的记录中没有验证。因此，ACC有效地在低维神经元子空间上运作，将刺激相关信息与内部线索相结合，以在冲突情况下驱动行为。
