School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney 2109, New South Wales, Australia
Perception in Action Research Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney 2109, New South Wales, Australia.
J Neurosci. 2024 Sep 18;44(38):e0224242024. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0224-24.2024.
Attention and decision-making processes are fundamental to cognition. However, they are usually experimentally confounded, making it difficult to link neural observations to specific processes. Here we separated the effects of selective attention from the effects of decision-making on brain activity obtained from human participants (both sexes), using a two-stage task where the attended stimulus and decision were orthogonal and separated in time. Multivariate pattern analyses of multimodal neuroimaging data revealed the dynamics of perceptual and decision-related information coding through time with magnetoencephalography (MEG), through space with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and their combination (MEG-fMRI fusion). Our MEG results showed an effect of attention before decision-making could begin, and fMRI results showed an attention effect in early visual and frontoparietal regions. Model-based MEG-fMRI fusion suggested that attention boosted stimulus information in the frontoparietal and early visual regions before decision-making was possible. Together, our results suggest that attention affects neural stimulus representations in the frontoparietal regions independent of decision-making.
注意和决策过程是认知的基础。然而，它们通常在实验中被混淆，使得将神经观察与特定过程联系起来变得困难。在这里，我们使用两阶段任务将选择性注意的影响与决策的影响从人类参与者（男女）的大脑活动中分离出来，在该任务中，注意刺激和决策是正交的，并且在时间上是分开的。多模态神经影像学数据的多元模式分析通过脑磁图（MEG）随着时间揭示了与感知和决策相关的信息编码的动力学，通过功能磁共振成像（fMRI）揭示了信息在空间上的编码，以及它们的组合（MEG-fMRI 融合）。我们的 MEG 结果显示，在决策开始之前，注意对信息有影响，fMRI 结果显示，在早期视觉和额顶叶区域，注意对信息有影响。基于模型的 MEG-fMRI 融合表明，在做出决策之前，注意会增强额顶叶和早期视觉区域的刺激信息。总的来说，我们的结果表明，注意会影响额顶叶区域的神经刺激表示，而与决策无关。
