A flexible readout mechanism of human sensory representations

Abstract

Attention can both enhance and suppress cortical sensory representations. However, changing sensory representations can also be detrimental to behavior. Behavioral consequences can be avoided by flexibly changing sensory readout, while leaving the representations unchanged. Here, we asked human observers to attend to and report about either one of two features which control the visibility of motion while making concurrent measurements of cortical activity with BOLD imaging (fMRI). We extend a well-established linking model to account for the relationship between these measurements and find that changes in sensory representation during directed attention are insufficient to explain perceptual reports. Adding a flexible downstream readout is necessary to best explain our data. Such a model implies that observers should be able to recover information about ignored features, a prediction which we confirm behaviorally. Thus, flexible readout is a critical component of the cortical implementation of human adaptive behavior.

Memory precision for salient distractors decreases with learned suppression

“…These results lead to the prediction that the opposite should also be true: memory precision and awareness should decline as suppression improves. Such a result would be consistent with recent findings that reductions in distractor interference are related to mechanisms within visual cortex that prevent the "readout" of attentional priority signals to later stages of processing (Adam & Serences, 2020;Birman & Gardner, 2019;Won, Forloines, Zhou, & Geng, 2020).…”

Attention in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning

“…Finally, some forms of attention appear to act in multiple ways on the same system. For example, visual attention is believed to both: (1) enhance the sensitivity of visual neurons in the cortex by modulating their activity and (2) change subcortical activity such that sensory information is readout differently (Birman and Gardner, 2019;Sreenivasan and Sridharan, 2019). In this way, attention uses two different mechanisms, in different parts of the brain, to create its effect.…”

Neural representations of others’ traits predict social decisions

“…First, future studies are needed to better understand the circuit-level mechanisms through which multi-dimensional representations in the OFC drive subsequent decision-making processes. For example, it is possible that the context-specific effects of social perception on behavior (warmth affects advantageous inequity aversion, while competence affects disadvantageous inequity aversion) could be mediated by flexible readout of the OFC signals by downstream regions 65 . Second, it remains an open question how trait representations in the mentalizing network and the OFC are constructed from semantic knowledge about social groups, possibly represented in the anterior temporal lobe [66][67][68] .…”