Rideaux Reuben
School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia.
Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2024 Aug 8;2. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00266. eCollection 2024.
Attention supports efficient perception by increasing the neural signals of targets while suppressing those of distractors. Decades of work studying the event-related potentials of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings have established our understanding of attention in the human brain, but many aspects of this phenomenon remain unknown. Several recent studies suggest that multivariate analyses may provide new insights into how attention shapes the neural representations of stimuli; however, it is unclear whether the increased multivariate decoding accuracy associated with task relevance represents a change in the stimulus representation or an additional cognitive process. To understand what the change in multivariate information that is associated with task relevance reflects, here we used inverted encoding to characterise how task relevance shapes the neural representation of space and colour. For both spatial and feature-based tasks, we found that the change in the EEG recordings associated with task relevance is not related to the stimulus representation. Rather, our findings indicate that this phenomenon reflects an additional cognitive process, such as target recognition.
注意力通过增强目标的神经信号同时抑制干扰物的信号来支持高效感知。数十年来，对脑电图（EEG）记录的事件相关电位的研究使我们对人类大脑中的注意力有了一定的了解，但这一现象的许多方面仍不清楚。最近的几项研究表明，多变量分析可能为注意力如何塑造刺激的神经表征提供新的见解；然而，尚不清楚与任务相关性相关的多变量解码准确性的提高是代表刺激表征的变化还是额外的认知过程。为了理解与任务相关性相关的多变量信息变化反映了什么，我们在这里使用反向编码来表征任务相关性如何塑造空间和颜色的神经表征。对于基于空间和特征的任务，我们发现与任务相关性相关的脑电图记录变化与刺激表征无关。相反，我们的研究结果表明，这种现象反映了一种额外的认知过程，例如目标识别。
