Humans reconfigure target and distractor processing to address distinct task demands

Abstract

When faced with distraction, we can focus more on goal-relevant information (targets) or focus less goal-conflicting information (distractors). How people decide to distribute cognitive control across targets and distractors remains unclear. To help address this question, we developed a parametric attentional control task with a graded manipulation to both target discriminability and distractor interference. We find that participants exert independent control over target and distractor processing. We measured control adjustments through the influence of incentives and previous conflict on target and distractor sensitivity, finding that these have dissociable influences on control. Whereas incentives preferentially led to target enhancement, conflict on the previous trial preferentially led to distractor suppression. These distinct drivers of control altered sensitivity to targets and distractors early in the trial, and were promptly followed by reactive reconfiguration towards task-appropriate feature sensitivity. Finally, we provide a process-level account of these findings by show that these control adjustments are well-captured by an evidence accumulation model with attractor dynamics over feature weights. These results help establish a process-level account of control configuration that provides new insights into how multivariate attentional signals are optimized to achieve task goals.

A new theoretical framework jointly explains behavioral and neural variability across subjects performing flexible decision-making

“…2), suggests that conclusions reached from rat data may generalize to other species as well. A recent study 36 indicates that human subjects performing context-dependent decision-making process different stimulus features independently, in line with our result that subjects can use separate mixtures of components to select and accumulate each of the two features (Fig. 1f, Fig.…”

Orthogonal neural encoding of targets and distractors supports multivariate cognitive control

“…In contrast, IPS had orthogonal representations of feature coherence, consistent with selective prioritization of task-relevant information (Adam and Serences, 2021; Greenberg et al, 2010; Jackson et al, 2017; Kay and Yeatman, 2017; Molenberghs et al, 2007; Serences and Yantis, 2007; Suzuki and Gottlieb, 2013; Woolgar et al, 2015b, 2015a, 2011; Yantis et al, 2002). Our previous work has demonstrated behavioral evidence for independent control over target and distractor attentional priority in this task (Ritz and Shenhav, 2021), with different task variables selectively enhancing target or distractor sensitivity (see also (Egner, 2008; Soutschek et al, 2015)). Orthogonal feature representation in IPS may offer a mechanism for this feature-selective control, consistent with theoretical accounts of IPS implementing a priority map that combines stimulus- or value-dependent salience with goal-dependent feedback from PFC (Bisley and Goldberg, 2010; Corbetta and Shulman, 2002; Gottlieb et al, 2020; Yantis and Serences, 2003).…”

“…These tasks were matched in their visual properties (identical stimuli) and motor outputs (left/right responses), but critically differed in their control demands. Attend-Motion was designed to be much easier than Attend-Color, as the left/right motion directions are compatible with the left/right response directions (i.e., Simon facilitation; (Ritz and Shenhav, 2021)). Comparing these tasks allows us to disambiguate bottom-up attentional salience from the top-down contributions to attentional priority (Woolgar et al, 2015b, 2015a, 2011).…”

“…This flexibility is enabled by the array of mental tools we can bring to bear on challenges to our goal pursuit (Badre et al, 2021; Danielmeier and Ullsperger, 2011; Egner, 2008; Ritz et al, 2022a). For example, someone may respond to a mistake by becoming more cautious, enhancing task-relevant processing, or suppressing task-irrelevant processing (Danielmeier and Ullsperger, 2011), and previous work has shown that people simultaneously deploy multiple such strategies at the same time in response to different task demands (Danielmeier et al, 2011; Fischer et al, 2018; Leng et al, 2021; Ritz and Shenhav, 2021). While the breadth of these control adjustments and the conditions under which they occur have become increasingly clear, how we achieve this level of coordination remains largely mysterious.…”

“…In particular, it is unclear how people monitor and direct simultaneous control signals over multiple parallel streams of information. Here, we seek to fill this gap by combining recent developments in experimentally ‘tagging’ information processing streams during cognitive control (Flesch et al, 2022; Kayser et al, 2010b; Ritz and Shenhav, 2021) with emerging analytic methods for quantifying representational geometry (Bernardi et al, 2020; Ebitz et al, 2020; Libby and Buschman, 2021). We hypothesized this multivariate control depends on independent neural representations, in the form of orthogonal encoding subspaces, that track multiple sources of difficulty and selectively adjusts the attentional priority across multiple task features.…”