Alitto Henry J, Johnson Jeffrey S, Usrey W Martin
Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, California 95618
Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, University of California, Davis, California, 95618.
eNeuro. 2025 Sep 26;12(9). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0153-25.2025. Print 2025 Sep.
Visual responses in the cortex are strongly influenced by shifts in spatial attention. This modulation of visual processing includes changes in firing rate, decreased response variability, and decreased interneuronal correlations; all of which are thought to underlie enhanced perception near the center of attention at the cost of perception at other locations. Information from the retina is relayed to primary visual cortex via neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus. Although early studies describe an enhancement of LGN activity with spatial attention, more recent work has cast doubt on this view. Given its strategic position as the gateway to the cortex, an understanding of the effects of attention on visual processing in the LGN is important. We therefore performed experiments to reexamine the influence of spatial attention on spiking activity in macaque LGN (one male, one female) and applied a broad set of analyses and functional metrics to assess possible effects. Our results reveal a statistically significant effect of spatial attention in the LGN: firing rates were slightly higher and more reliable when monkeys directed attention toward the receptive fields of recorded neurons compared with when attention was directed to different retinotopic locations. However, effects were much smaller than previously reported (∼1 vs ∼4%) and further analyses suggest that effects are weak, inconsistent, and restricted to a small subset of parvocellular and magnocellular neurons. Thus, while spatial attention does exert an influence in the LGN, its effects are weak and may have limited impact on downstream processing.
皮层中的视觉反应受到空间注意力转移的强烈影响。这种对视觉处理的调制包括放电率的变化、反应变异性的降低以及神经元间相关性的降低；所有这些都被认为是以牺牲其他位置的感知为代价，增强注意力中心附近的感知的基础。来自视网膜的信息通过丘脑外侧膝状体（LGN）中的神经元中继到初级视觉皮层。尽管早期研究描述了空间注意力会增强LGN的活动，但最近的研究对此观点提出了质疑。鉴于其作为通向皮层的门户的战略地位，了解注意力对LGN中视觉处理的影响很重要。因此，我们进行了实验，重新审视空间注意力对猕猴LGN（一只雄性，一只雌性）中尖峰活动的影响，并应用了一系列广泛的分析和功能指标来评估可能的影响。我们的结果揭示了空间注意力在LGN中具有统计学上的显著影响：与注意力指向不同视网膜位置时相比，当猴子将注意力指向记录神经元的感受野时，放电率略高且更可靠。然而，这种影响比先前报道的要小得多（约1%对约4%），进一步的分析表明，这种影响微弱、不一致，并且仅限于一小部分小细胞和大细胞神经元。因此，虽然空间注意力确实会在LGN中产生影响，但其影响微弱，可能对下游处理的影响有限。
