Dataset Information

Selective Attention Controls Olfactory Decisions and the Neural Encoding of Odors.

ABSTRACT: Critical animal behaviors, especially among rodents, are guided by odors in remarkably well-coordinated manners, yet many extramodal sensory cues compete for cognitive resources in these ecological contexts. That rodents can engage in such odor-guided behaviors suggests that they can selectively attend to odors. Indeed, higher-order cognitive processes-such as learning, memory, decision making, and action selection-rely on the proper filtering of sensory cues based on their relative salience. We developed a behavioral paradigm to reveal that rats are capable of selectively attending to odors in the presence of competing extramodal stimuli. We found that this selective attention facilitates accurate odor-guided decisions, which become further strengthened with experience. Further, we uncovered that selective attention to odors adaptively sharpens their representation among neurons in the olfactory tubercle, an olfactory cortex region of the ventral striatum that is considered integral for evaluating sensory information in the context of motivated behaviors. Odor-directed selective attention exerts influences during moments of heightened odor anticipation and enhances odorant representation by increasing stimulus contrast in a signal-to-noise-type coding scheme. Together, these results reveal that rats engage selective attention to optimize olfactory outcomes. Further, our finding of attention-dependent coding in the olfactory tubercle challenges the notion that a thalamic relay is integral for the attentional control of sensory coding.

SUBMITTER: Carlson KS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6530575 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Selective Attention Controls Olfactory Decisions and the Neural Encoding of Odors.

Carlson Kaitlin S KS Gadziola Marie A MA Dauster Emma S ES Wesson Daniel W DW

Current biology : CB 20180628 14

Critical animal behaviors, especially among rodents, are guided by odors in remarkably well-coordinated manners, yet many extramodal sensory cues compete for cognitive resources in these ecological contexts. That rodents can engage in such odor-guided behaviors suggests that they can selectively attend to odors. Indeed, higher-order cognitive processes-such as learning, memory, decision making, and action selection-rely on the proper filtering of sensory cues based on their relative salience. We ...[more]

PMID: 30056854

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Project description:The encoding of sensory information in the human brain is thought to be optimised by two principal processes: 'prediction' uses stored information to guide the interpretation of forthcoming sensory events, and 'attention' prioritizes these events according to their behavioural relevance. Despite the ubiquitous contributions of attention and prediction to various aspects of perception and cognition, it remains unknown how they interact to modulate information processing in the brain. A recent extension of predictive coding theory suggests that attention optimises the expected precision of predictions by modulating the synaptic gain of prediction error units. Because prediction errors code for the difference between predictions and sensory signals, this model would suggest that attention increases the selectivity for mismatch information in the neural response to a surprising stimulus. Alternative predictive coding models propose that attention increases the activity of prediction (or 'representation') neurons and would therefore suggest that attention and prediction synergistically modulate selectivity for 'feature information' in the brain. Here, we applied forward encoding models to neural activity recorded via electroencephalography (EEG) as human observers performed a simple visual task to test for the effect of attention on both mismatch and feature information in the neural response to surprising stimuli. Participants attended or ignored a periodic stream of gratings, the orientations of which could be either predictable, surprising, or unpredictable. We found that surprising stimuli evoked neural responses that were encoded according to the difference between predicted and observed stimulus features, and that attention facilitated the encoding of this type of information in the brain. These findings advance our understanding of how attention and prediction modulate information processing in the brain, as well as support the theory that attention optimises precision expectations during hierarchical inference by increasing the gain of prediction errors.

Dataset Information

Selective Attention Controls Olfactory Decisions and the Neural Encoding of Odors.

Publications

Selective Attention Controls Olfactory Decisions and the Neural Encoding of Odors.

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