Distinct population codes for attention in the absence and presence of visual stimulation.

ABSTRACT: Visual neurons respond more vigorously to an attended stimulus than an unattended one. How the brain prepares for response gain in anticipation of that stimulus is not well understood. One prominent proposal is that anticipation is characterized by gain-like modulations of spontaneous activity similar to gains in stimulus responses. Here we test an alternative idea: anticipation is characterized by a mixture of both increases and decreases of spontaneous firing rates. Such a strategy would be adaptive as it supports a simple linear scheme for disentangling internal, modulatory signals from external, sensory inputs. We recorded populations of V4 neurons in monkeys performing an attention task, and found that attention states are signaled by different mixtures of neurons across the populatio

SUBMITTER: Snyder AC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6197235 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature