Preparation for upcoming attentional states in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Goal-directed attention is usually studied by providing individuals with explicit instructions on what they should attend to. But in daily life, we often use past experiences to guide our attentional states. Given the importance of memory for predicting upcoming events, we hypothesized that memory-guided attention is supported by neural preparation for anticipated attentional states. We examined preparatory coding in the human hippocampus and mPFC, two regions that are important for memory-guided behaviors, in two tasks: one where attention was guided by memory and another in which attention was explicitly instructed. Hippocampus and mPFC exhibited higher activity for memory-guided vs. explicitly instructed attention. Furthermore, representations in both regions contained information about upcoming attentional states. In the hippocampus, this preparation was stronger for memory-guided attention, and occurred alongside stronger coupling with visual cortex during attentional guidance. These results highlight the mechanisms by which memories are used to prepare for upcoming attentional goals.</jats:p><jats:sec><jats:title>Competing Interests</jats:title><jats:p>None.</jats:p></jats:sec>

Human Representation Learning

“…Sequential sampling can thus provide a coherent mechanistic account for how attention and memory processes support representation learning, grounding it in principles of statistical inference (Daw & Courville 2007, Radulescu et al 2019b). This view is consistent with empirical work showing that the focus of attention depends on what aspects of past experience are remembered (Goldfarb et al 2016, Günseli & Aly 2020, Hutchinson & Turk-Browne 2012, Myers et al 2017.…”