Endogenous-like orienting of visual attention in rats

Marote, Claudia Franco Olim; Xavier, Gilberto Fernando

doi:10.1007/s10071-011-0388-3

Cited by 23 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…By training the mice to maintain their heads centrally, their eyes were placed to see the central and peripheral stimuli. Previous studies have successfully trained rats to sustain the nose-poke at the centre in the adapted Posner task [16,35]. Similar to rats, the current study showed that mice could be trained to extend their nose-poking time on the touchscreen after stepwise training and to maintain their nose-poking ability during the randomised training.…”

Section: Task Acquisition: Mice Can Be Trained To Spontaneously Complsupporting

confidence: 59%

Assessing Attention Orienting in Mice: A Novel Touchscreen Adaptation of the Posner-Style Cueing Task

May

Hannan

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Atypical attention orienting has been found to be impaired in many neuropsychological disorders, but the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Attention can be oriented exogenously (i.e., driven by salient stimuli) or endogenously (i.e., driven by one's goals or intentions). Genetic mouse models are useful tools to investigate the neurobiology of cognition, but a well-established assessment of attention orienting in mice is missing. This study aimed to adapt the Posner task, a widely used attention orienting task in humans, for use in mice using touchscreen technology and to test the effects of two attention-modulating drugs, methylphenidate (MPH) and atomoxetine (ATX), on the performance of mice during this task. In accordance with human performance, mice responded more quickly and more accurately to validly cued targets compared to invalidly cued targets, thus supporting mice as a valid animal model to study the neural mechanisms of attention orienting. This is the first evidence that mice can be trained to voluntarily maintain their nose-poke on a touchscreen and to complete attention orienting tasks using exogenous peripheral cues and endogenous symbolic cues. The results also showed no significant effects of MPH and ATX on attention orienting, although MPH improved overall response times in mice during the exogenous orienting task. In summary, the current study provides a critical translational task for assessing attention orienting in mice and to investigate the effects of attention-modulating drugs on attention orienting.

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Section: Task Acquisition: Mice Can Be Trained To Spontaneously Complsupporting

confidence: 59%

Assessing Attention Orienting in Mice: A Novel Touchscreen Adaptation of the Posner-Style Cueing Task

May

Hannan

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…The goal of the present work was to assess whether an organism with a small brain (volume: 1 mm 3 , about 1 million neurons) without a layered cortex can show cueing effects similar to those measured in humans, monkeys, rats (Bushnell and Rice, 1999; Marote and Xavier, 2011) and pigeons (Shimp and Friedrich, 1993). Previous studies have shown that bees can learn coarse and fine visual discriminations (Srinivasan, 2010) as well as complex shapes (Giurfa, Hammer, et al, 1999; Zhang et al, 2004; for a review see, Menzel et al, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies have shown that monkeys (Cook and Maunsell, 2002; Maunsell and Cook, 2002), rats (Bushnell and Rice, 1999; Marote and Xavier, 2011) and pigeons (Shimp and Friedrich, 1993) all use predictive cues and show cueing effects. But does an organism with a small brain and no cortical structure also use predictive cues and give rise to a behavioral cueing effect?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking human visual attention: Spatial cueing effects and optimality of decisions by honeybees, monkeys and humans

et al. 2013

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Visual attention is commonly studied by using visuo-spatial cues indicating probable locations of a target and assessing the effect of the validity of the cue on perceptual performance and its neural correlates. Here, we adapt a cueing task to measure spatial cueing effects on the decisions of honeybees and compare their behavior to that of humans and monkeys in a similarly structured two-alternative forced-choice perceptual task. Unlike the typical cueing paradigm in which the stimulus strength remains unchanged within a block of trials, for the monkey and human studies we randomized the contrast of the signal to simulate more real world conditions in which the organism is uncertain about the strength of the signal. A Bayesian ideal observer that weights sensory evidence from cued and uncued locations based on the cue validity to maximize overall performance is used as a benchmark of comparison against the three animals and other suboptimal models: probability matching, ignore the cue, always follow the cue, and an additive bias/single decision threshold model. We find that the cueing effect is pervasive across all three species but is smaller in size than that shown by the Bayesian ideal observer. Humans show a larger cueing effect than monkeys and bees show the smallest effect. The cueing effect and overall performance of the honeybees allows rejection of the models in which the bees are ignoring the cue, following the cue and disregarding stimuli to be discriminated, or adopting a probability matching strategy. Stimulus strength uncertainty also reduces the theoretically predicted variation in cueing effect with stimulus strength of an optimal Bayesian observer and diminishes the size of the cueing effect when stimulus strength is low. A more biologically plausible model that includes an additive bias to the sensory response from the cued location, although not mathematically equivalent to the optimal observer for the case stimulus strength uncertainty, can approximate the benefits of the more computationally complex optimal Bayesian model. We discuss the implications of our findings on the field’s common conceptualization of covert visual attention in the cueing task and what aspects, if any, might be unique to humans.

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“…At longer CTOAs, however, after visual attention is disengaged from the cued location facilitation gives way to inhibition of return 18 . Spatial cueing effects using predictive cues have been demonstrated in other species as well – monkeys 19 , rats 20 , honeybees 21 , archer fish 22,23 highlighting their potential role in species survival. IOR is thus, seen as a ‘foraging facilitator’ 24 and has been suggested to improve search efficiency by reducing the likelihood of attention returning to already fixated locations 24–26 (but see 27 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No supplementary evidence of attention to a spatial cue when saccadic facilitation is absent

MacInnes

Bhatnagar

2018

Sci Rep

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Attending a location in space facilitates responses to targets at that location when the time between cue and target is short. Certain types of exogenous cues – such as sudden peripheral onsets – have been described as reflexive and automatic. Recent studies however, have been showing many cases where exogenous cues are less automatic than previously believed and do not always result in facilitation. A lack of the behavioral facilitation, however, does not automatically necessitate a lack of underlying attention to that location. We test exogenous cueing in two experiments where facilitation is and is not likely to be observed with saccadic responses. We also test alternate measures linked to the allocation of attention such as saccadic curvature, microsaccades and pupil size. As expected, we find early facilitation as measured by saccadic reaction time when CTOAs are predictable but not when they are randomized within a block. We find no impact of the cue on microsaccade direction for either experiment, and only a slight dip in the frequency of microsaccades after the cue. We do find that change in pupil size to the cue predicts the magnitude of the validity effect, but only in the experiment where facilitation was observed. In both experiments, we observed a tendency for saccadic curvature to deviate away from the cued location and this was stronger for early CTOAs and toward vertical targets. Overall, we find that only change in pupil size is consistent with observed facilitation. Saccadic curvature is influenced by the onset of the cue, buts its direction is indicative of oculomotor inhibition whether we see RT facilitation or not. Microsaccades were not diagnostic in either experiment. Finally, we see little to no evidence of attention at the cued location in any additional measures when facilitation of saccadic responses is absent.

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Endogenous-like orienting of visual attention in rats

Cited by 23 publications

References 24 publications

Assessing Attention Orienting in Mice: A Novel Touchscreen Adaptation of the Posner-Style Cueing Task

Assessing Attention Orienting in Mice: A Novel Touchscreen Adaptation of the Posner-Style Cueing Task

Rethinking human visual attention: Spatial cueing effects and optimality of decisions by honeybees, monkeys and humans

No supplementary evidence of attention to a spatial cue when saccadic facilitation is absent

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