Dataset Information

Spiking Suppression Precedes Cued Attentional Enhancement of Neural Responses in Primary Visual Cortex.

ABSTRACT: Attending to a visual stimulus increases its detectability, even if gaze is directed elsewhere. This covert attentional selection is known to enhance spiking across many brain areas, including the primary visual cortex (V1). Here we investigate the temporal dynamics of attention-related spiking changes in V1 of macaques performing a task that separates attentional selection from the onset of visual stimulation. We found that preceding attentional enhancement there was a sharp, transient decline in spiking following presentation of an attention-guiding cue. This disruption of V1 spiking was not observed in a task-naïve subject that passively observed the same stimulus sequence, suggesting that sensory activation is insufficient to cause suppression. Following this suppression, attended stimuli evoked more spiking than unattended stimuli, matching previous reports of attention-related activity in V1. Laminar analyses revealed a distinct pattern of activation in feedback-associated layers during both the cue-induced suppression and subsequent attentional enhancement. These findings suggest that top-down modulation of V1 spiking can be bidirectional and result in either suppression or enhancement of spiking responses.

SUBMITTER: Cox MA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6294403 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Spiking Suppression Precedes Cued Attentional Enhancement of Neural Responses in Primary Visual Cortex.

Cox Michele A MA Dougherty Kacie K Adams Geoffrey K GK Reavis Eric A EA Westerberg Jacob A JA Moore Brandon S BS Leopold David A DA Maier Alexander A

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 20190101 1

Attending to a visual stimulus increases its detectability, even if gaze is directed elsewhere. This covert attentional selection is known to enhance spiking across many brain areas, including the primary visual cortex (V1). Here we investigate the temporal dynamics of attention-related spiking changes in V1 of macaques performing a task that separates attentional selection from the onset of visual stimulation. We found that preceding attentional enhancement there was a sharp, transient decline ...[more]

PMID: 29186348

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Project description:Contextual information triggers predictions about the content ("what") of environmental stimuli to update an internal generative model of the surrounding world. However, visual information dynamically changes across time, and temporal predictability ("when") may influence the impact of internal predictions on visual processing. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we investigated how processing feature specific information ("what") is affected by temporal predictability ("when"). Participants (N = 16) were presented with four consecutive Gabor patches (entrainers) with constant spatial frequency but with variable orientation and temporal onset. A fifth target Gabor was presented after a longer delay and with higher or lower spatial frequency that participants had to judge. We compared the neural responses to entrainers where the Gabor orientation could, or could not be temporally predicted along the entrainer sequence, and with inter-entrainer timing that was constant (predictable), or variable (unpredictable). We observed suppression of evoked neural responses in the visual cortex for predictable stimuli. Interestingly, we found that temporal uncertainty increased expectation suppression. This suggests that in temporally uncertain scenarios the neurocognitive system invests less resources in integrating bottom-up information. Multivariate pattern analysis showed that predictable visual features could be decoded from neural responses. Temporal uncertainty did not affect decoding accuracy for early visual responses, with the feature specificity of early visual neural activity preserved across conditions. However, decoding accuracy was less sustained over time for temporally jittered than for isochronous predictable visual stimuli. These findings converge to suggest that the cognitive system processes visual features of temporally predictable stimuli in higher detail, while processing temporally uncertain stimuli may rely more heavily on abstract internal expectations.

Dataset Information

Spiking Suppression Precedes Cued Attentional Enhancement of Neural Responses in Primary Visual Cortex.

Publications

Spiking Suppression Precedes Cued Attentional Enhancement of Neural Responses in Primary Visual Cortex.

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