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Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST
Visual attention modulates the firing rate of neurons in many primate cortical areas. In V4, a cortical area in the ventral visual pathway, spatial attention has also been shown to reduce the tendency of neurons to fire closely separated spikes (burstiness). A recent model proposes that a single mec...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Oxford University Press
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5939203/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28365773 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhw326 |
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author | Xue, Cheng Kaping, Daniel Ray, Sonia Baloni Krishna, B. Suresh Treue, Stefan |
author_facet | Xue, Cheng Kaping, Daniel Ray, Sonia Baloni Krishna, B. Suresh Treue, Stefan |
author_sort | Xue, Cheng |
collection | PubMed |
description | Visual attention modulates the firing rate of neurons in many primate cortical areas. In V4, a cortical area in the ventral visual pathway, spatial attention has also been shown to reduce the tendency of neurons to fire closely separated spikes (burstiness). A recent model proposes that a single mechanism accounts for both the firing rate enhancement and the burstiness reduction in V4, but this has not been empirically tested. It is also unclear if the burstiness reduction by spatial attention is found in other visual areas and for other attentional types. We therefore recorded from single neurons in the medial superior temporal area (MST), a key motion-processing area along the dorsal visual pathway, of two rhesus monkeys while they performed a task engaging both spatial and feature-based attention. We show that in MST, spatial attention is associated with a clear reduction in burstiness that is independent of the concurrent enhancement of firing rate. In contrast, feature-based attention enhances firing rate but is not associated with a significant reduction in burstiness. These results establish burstiness reduction as a widespread effect of spatial attention. They also suggest that in contrast to the recently proposed model, the effects of spatial attention on burstiness and firing rate emerge from different mechanisms. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5939203 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-59392032018-05-10 Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST Xue, Cheng Kaping, Daniel Ray, Sonia Baloni Krishna, B. Suresh Treue, Stefan Cereb Cortex Original Articles Visual attention modulates the firing rate of neurons in many primate cortical areas. In V4, a cortical area in the ventral visual pathway, spatial attention has also been shown to reduce the tendency of neurons to fire closely separated spikes (burstiness). A recent model proposes that a single mechanism accounts for both the firing rate enhancement and the burstiness reduction in V4, but this has not been empirically tested. It is also unclear if the burstiness reduction by spatial attention is found in other visual areas and for other attentional types. We therefore recorded from single neurons in the medial superior temporal area (MST), a key motion-processing area along the dorsal visual pathway, of two rhesus monkeys while they performed a task engaging both spatial and feature-based attention. We show that in MST, spatial attention is associated with a clear reduction in burstiness that is independent of the concurrent enhancement of firing rate. In contrast, feature-based attention enhances firing rate but is not associated with a significant reduction in burstiness. These results establish burstiness reduction as a widespread effect of spatial attention. They also suggest that in contrast to the recently proposed model, the effects of spatial attention on burstiness and firing rate emerge from different mechanisms. Oxford University Press 2017-01 2016-11-22 /pmc/articles/PMC5939203/ /pubmed/28365773 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhw326 Text en © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Articles Xue, Cheng Kaping, Daniel Ray, Sonia Baloni Krishna, B. Suresh Treue, Stefan Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title | Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title_full | Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title_fullStr | Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title_full_unstemmed | Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title_short | Spatial Attention Reduces Burstiness in Macaque Visual Cortical Area MST |
title_sort | spatial attention reduces burstiness in macaque visual cortical area mst |
topic | Original Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5939203/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28365773 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhw326 |
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