Visuospatial selective attention in chickens

Abstract

Voluntary control of attention promotes intelligent, adaptive behaviors by enabling the selective processing of information that is most relevant for making decisions. Despite extensive research on attention in primates, the capacity for selective attention in nonprimate species has never been quantified. Here we demonstrate selective attention in chickens by applying protocols that have been used to characterize visual spatial attention in primates. Chickens were trained to localize and report the vertical position of a target in the presence of task-relevant distracters. A spatial cue, the location of which varied across individual trials, indicated the horizontal, but not vertical, position of the upcoming target. Spatial cueing improved localization performance: accuracy (d′) increased and reaction times decreased in a space-specific manner. Distracters severely impaired perceptual performance, and this impairment was greatly reduced by spatial cueing. Signal detection analysis with an "indecision" model demonstrated that spatial cueing significantly increased choice certainty in localizing targets. By contrast, error-aversion certainty (certainty of not making an error) remained essentially constant across cueing protocols, target contrasts, and individuals. The results show that chickens shift spatial attention rapidly and dynamically, following principles of stimulus selection that closely parallel those documented in primates. The findings suggest that the mechanisms that control attention have been conserved through evolution, and establish chickens-a highly visual species that is easily trained and amenable to cutting-edge experimental technologiesas an attractive model for linking behavior to neural mechanisms of selective attention.T he capacity to select particular locations or stimuli for differential analysis and decision making is essential for any animal to behave intelligently in a complex environment. It follows that neural mechanisms that enable this capacity must have appeared early in evolution (1). In humans, and nonhuman primates, selective attention enables such adaptive behavior by selecting from all possible information the information that is most relevant for making decisions (2, 3). However, little is known about whether the capacity for selective attention exists in nonprimate vertebrate species.Studies that were intended to measure selective attention in nonprimate species have produced inconclusive results for several reasons. First, much of the previous work has inferred the capacity for selective attention based on selective learning or selective reporting of specific cue features, both in birds (4) and in rodents (5). For example, in highly cited work on feature-based attention (4), pigeons were reinforced for pecking on targets that contained combinations of two features (e.g., color and shape). In later trials, when the features were presented individually, they pecked almost exclusively on targets with only one of the two features (e.g., color, ignoring shape). The results ...

Brains, Genes, and Primates

“…This process is severely impaired in multiple brain disorders including autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s’ Disease. Many animals, including chickens (Sridharan et al, 2014; Ben-Tov et al, 2014) exhibit forms of attentional selection, and some of the mechanisms that play a role in attention in primates are shared with rodents. For example, neurophysiological studies in non-human primates have found that when attention is directed toward a visual stimulus, this increases the gain of neurons responsive to the attended stimulus (McAdams and Maunsell, 1999) while suppressing the activity of neurons selective for nearby unattended stimuli (Desimore and Duncan, 1995), via activation of inhibitory interneurons (Mitchell et al, 2007; Sundberg et al, 2009).…”

Crows control working memory before and after stimulus encoding

“…This is most evident in the fact that the performance on pre-cue trials did not show an effect of WM-load but was indistinguishable between 4-and 6-color trials. While attention has already been demonstrated in birds 39,41 , to our knowledge it has never been shown before that birds can use attention to maximize WM capacity.…”

Space-Specific Deficits in Visual Orientation Discrimination Caused by Lesions in the Midbrain Stimulus Selection Network

“…Pecking on the cross therefore forced the head and eyes into standard positions relative to the screen. The stability and stereotypy of the head and eye positions during this period enabled us to present visual stimuli at known locations in the visual field [49]. …”

“…This protocol was the same as the distractor protocol, except that cueing stimuli preceded the presentation of the target stimulus. The cued-locations protocol was modeled on a protocol published previously [49]. In 50% of the trials, a 100% valid spatial cue (10º radius, red annulus) was presented on the side of the target stimulus, at the horizon, and centered 15º beyond where the target stimulus would appear.…”