2018 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

5-8 September 2018    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper: PS-1B.25
Session: Poster Session 1B
Location: Symphony/Overture
Session Time: Thursday, September 6, 18:45 - 20:45
Presentation Time:Thursday, September 6, 18:45 - 20:45
Presentation: Poster
Publication: 2018 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 5-8 September 2018, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Paper Title: Decision-related activity & feature-selective attention: evidence for a common mechanism in macaque V2
Manuscript:  Click here to view manuscript
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2018.1216-0
Authors: Katrina R Quinn, Stephane Clery, Paria Pourriahi, Hendrikje Nienborg, University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract: During perceptual decisions the activity of sensory neurons is often correlated with an animal’s decision. These correlations with choice (“choice-probability”, CP) are thought to reflect both feedforward and feedback sources (e.g. Clery et al., 2017). For a feature discrimination task, this implies that the feedback is feature-selective. One hypothesis is that the modulation of sensory neurons by feature-selective attention and the feedback source of CP reflect the same mechanism (Haefner et al., 2016). We combined this hypothesis with a classical finding of feature-selective attention – that it modulates the activity of feature-selective neurons globally, i.e. even when the attended stimulus is in the opposite hemifield to the receptive field of the modulated neuron (Treue & Martinez-Trujillo, 1999). This predicts that CP should also be observed globally, including for an ignored stimulus. We tested this prediction by recording in macaque V2, whilst the animal performed a disparity discrimination task, and either the task-relevant or task-irrelevant stimulus was inside the neurons’ receptive fields. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found substantial CP for neurons representing ignored, task-irrelevant stimuli. Importantly, this would not be predicted by a feedforward account of CP, but is predicted if feature-selective attention and decision-related activity engage a common mechanism.