Monkey Area MT Latencies to Speed Changes Depend on Attention and Correlate with Behavioral Reaction Times

Galashan, F. Orlando; Saßen, Hanna C.; Kreiter, Andreas K.; Wegener, Detlef

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2013.03.014

Cited by 47 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…It is suggested that common neuromodulatory systems are involved in regulating attention and cortical desynchronization (4,5), and attention may lead to a reduction in response latency (45). Indeed, attention-induced latency advance has been observed in monkey V4 (46,47) and MT (48), and the shorter latency of visual response correlates with faster reaction of the animal (47,48). Because selective attention may involve local desynchronization of neuronal activity along the visual pathway representing the attended stimulus (4,49), the cumulative effect revealed here may play a role in visual processing during selective attention.…”

Section: Brain State Modulation Of Response Latency In Various Sensorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cumulative latency advance underlies fast visual processing in desynchronized brain state

Wang

Chen

Zhang

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Fast sensory processing is vital for the animal to efficiently respond to the changing environment. This is usually achieved when the animal is vigilant, as reflected by cortical desynchronization. However, the neural substrate for such fast processing remains unclear. Here, we report that neurons in rat primary visual cortex (V1) exhibited shorter response latency in the desynchronized state than in the synchronized state. In vivo whole-cell recording from the same V1 neurons undergoing the two states showed that both the resting and visually evoked conductances were higher in the desynchronized state. Such conductance increases of single V1 neurons shorten the response latency by elevating the membrane potential closer to the firing threshold and reducing the membrane time constant, but the effects only account for a small fraction of the observed latency advance. Simultaneous recordings in lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and V1 revealed that LGN neurons also exhibited latency advance, with a degree smaller than that of V1 neurons. Furthermore, latency advance in V1 increased across successive cortical layers. Thus, latency advance accumulates along various stages of the visual pathway, likely due to a global increase of membrane conductance in the desynchronized state. This cumulative effect may lead to a dramatic shortening of response latency for neurons in higher visual cortex and play a critical role in fast processing for vigilant animals.state-dependent temporal processing | synaptic inputs | hierarchical accumulation F ast reaction is essential for the survival of animals, such as when detecting and fleeing a predator. Humans or animals react rapidly in a vigilant state (1-3). The vigilance level of animals (also humans) varies with brain state, which can be characterized by the patterns of population activities measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) and local field potential (LFP) (4, 5). Although brain state exhibits diverse activity patterns, it can be broadly classified into a desynchronized state dominated by small-amplitude, high-frequency activities, and a synchronized state dominated by large-amplitude, low-frequency fluctuations (4, 5). The brain operates in the desynchronized state when the animal is alert or vigilant, whereas it operates in the synchronized state when the animal is quiescent or drowsy (4, 5). To understand the neural substrate for fast processing in the vigilant state, it is important to compare response latencies in the two brain states for sensory cortical neurons, which are at the initial stage along the sensorimotor pathway.Brain state has a dominant impact on both resting properties (6, 7) and sensory evoked responses (4, 8, 9) of cortical neurons. For the visual system, although brain state or behavioral state can modulate response amplitude, spatial receptive field, and temporal frequency tuning of the neurons in the early visual pathway (10-13), it is not clear whether brain state can modulate response latency of primary visual cortex (V1) neurons. Furthermore, the ...

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Section: Brain State Modulation Of Response Latency In Various Sensorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cumulative latency advance underlies fast visual processing in desynchronized brain state

Wang

Chen

Zhang

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…100 Computational models confirm that multiplicative-gain type 101 increases in neuronal firing rates can produce a benefit when 102 decoding population activity (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009;Mitchell 103 et al, 2009;Ling et al, 2009). Attention also reduces the latency of 104 neuronal responses (Sundberg et al, 2012;Galashan et al, 2013), 105 which could potentially provide more information in a shorter 106 amount of time, thus facilitating a faster reaction. More intense or 107 higher contrast stimuli evoke shorter latency responses across 108 numerous visual areas (Bell et al, 2006;Raiguel et al, 1999; 109 Albrecht, 1995;Oram et al, 2002); thus attention, by reducing 110 response latencies, effectively makes a stimulus resemble a higher 111 contrast version of itself, similar to its effect on the contrast 112 response function measured in firing rate (Reynolds et al, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…272 Attention also shortens the latency of visual responses in area MT, 273 and this decrease in latency is associated with faster overall 274 reaction times (Galashan et al, 2013). Attention-induced changes 275 in synchrony also predict performance in attention tasks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual attention: Linking prefrontal sources to neuronal and behavioral correlates

Clark

Squire

Merrikhi

et al. 2015

Progress in Neurobiology

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Attention is a means of flexibly selecting and enhancing a subset of sensory input based on the current behavioral goals. Numerous signatures of attention have been identified throughout the brain, and now experimenters are seeking to determine which of these signatures are causally related to the behavioral benefits of attention, and the source of these modulations within the brain. Here, we review the neural signatures of attention throughout the brain, their theoretical benefits for visual processing, and their experimental correlations with behavioral performance. We discuss the importance of measuring cue benefits as a way to distinguish between impairments on an attention task, which may instead be visual or motor impairments, and true attentional deficits. We examine evidence for various areas proposed as sources of attentional modulation within the brain, with a focus on the prefrontal cortex. Lastly, we look at studies that aim to link sources of attention to its neuronal signatures elsewhere in the brain.

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“…For instance, directing attention to the motion of a stimulus, in terms of direction and speed, locally increases the firing rate (Treue and Maunsell, 1996) and the gamma power of the local field potential (Khayat et al, 2010) of neurons in motion-sensitive mediotemporal (MT) area, causes shrinkage of receptive fields around the attended stimulus (Womelsdorf et al, 2006a), and increases stimulus selectivity of single neurons (Wegener et al, 2004). As a consequence of attentional modulation, task-relevant motion changes are represented with shorter latency, and reaction times (RTs) become faster (Galashan et al, 2013). Corresponding findings have been obtained in other visual areas for features like color and form (McAdams and Maunsell, 1999; Reynolds et al, 1999; Fries et al, 2001; Taylor et al, 2005; Sundberg et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional spreading to task-irrelevant object features: experimental support and a 3-step model of attention for object-based selection and feature-based processing modulation

Wegener

Galashan

Aurich

et al. 2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Directing attention to a specific feature of an object has been linked to different forms of attentional modulation. Object-based attention theory founds on the finding that even task-irrelevant features at the selected object are subject to attentional modulation, while feature-based attention theory proposes a global processing benefit for the selected feature even at other objects. Most studies investigated either the one or the other form of attention, leaving open the possibility that both object- and feature-specific attentional effects do occur at the same time and may just represent two sides of a single attention system. We here investigate this issue by testing attentional spreading within and across objects, using reaction time (RT) measurements to changes of attended and unattended features on both attended and unattended objects. We asked subjects to report color and speed changes occurring on one of two overlapping random dot patterns (RDPs), presented at the center of gaze. The key property of the stimulation was that only one of the features (e.g., motion direction) was unique for each object, whereas the other feature (e.g., color) was shared by both. The results of two experiments show that co-selection of unattended features even occurs when those features have no means for selecting the object. At the same time, they demonstrate that this processing benefit is not restricted to the selected object but spreads to the task-irrelevant one. We conceptualize these findings by a 3-step model of attention that assumes a task-dependent top-down gain, object-specific feature selection based on task- and binding characteristics, and a global feature-specific processing enhancement. The model allows for the unification of a vast amount of experimental results into a single model, and makes various experimentally testable predictions for the interaction of object- and feature-specific processes.

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Monkey Area MT Latencies to Speed Changes Depend on Attention and Correlate with Behavioral Reaction Times

Cited by 47 publications

References 56 publications

Cumulative latency advance underlies fast visual processing in desynchronized brain state

Cumulative latency advance underlies fast visual processing in desynchronized brain state

Visual attention: Linking prefrontal sources to neuronal and behavioral correlates

Attentional spreading to task-irrelevant object features: experimental support and a 3-step model of attention for object-based selection and feature-based processing modulation

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