Sundby Kelsey K, Vaz Alex P, Wittig John H, Jackson Samantha N, Inati Sara K, Zaghloul Kareem A
Surgical Neurology Branch, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Surgical Neurology Branch, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA; Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Curr Biol. 2025 Mar 10;35(5):1085-1094.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.048. Epub 2025 Feb 17.
Attention aids in prioritizing information relevant to our present goals. For example, attention may augment sensory processing by modulating neural activity for low-level features of the attended items. Attention can also prioritize the contents of memory, facilitating our ability to remember some pieces of information while ignoring others. Here, we examine how using attention to modulate the contents of memory affects temporally organized sequences of neuronal spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe. These spike sequences represent higher-level semantic information and occur repeatedly and consistently as participants process and encode words into memory. Our results demonstrate that attention deployed to prioritize words for memory increases the consistency of these spike sequences. Further, retroactively cueing words elicits the replay of these sequences. Our data, therefore, suggest that paying attention to prioritizing semantic content for memory may improve the temporal organization of neural spiking representations of semantic information in the anterior temporal lobe.
注意力有助于对与我们当前目标相关的信息进行优先级排序。例如，注意力可以通过调节对被关注项目的低级特征的神经活动来增强感觉处理。注意力还可以对记忆内容进行优先级排序，帮助我们记住某些信息片段，同时忽略其他信息。在这里，我们研究了如何利用注意力来调节记忆内容，这对人类颞叶前部神经元放电的时间组织序列有何影响。这些放电序列代表更高层次的语义信息，并且在参与者处理单词并将其编码到记忆中时反复且一致地出现。我们的结果表明，为了记忆而分配注意力来对单词进行优先级排序会增加这些放电序列的一致性。此外，追溯性地提示单词会引发这些序列的重放。因此，我们的数据表明，关注为记忆而对语义内容进行优先级排序可能会改善颞叶前部语义信息的神经放电表征的时间组织。
