Modulation of Spike Count Correlations Between Macaque Primary Visual Cortex Neurons by Difficulty of Attentional Task  

作　　者：Qiyi Hu Wenjuan Hu Keyi Liu Xiangdong Bu Lisha Hu Liming Li Xinyu Chai Yao Chen 

机构地区：[1]School of Biomedical Engineering,Shanghai Jiao Tong University,Shanghai 200240,China

出　　处：《Neuroscience Bulletin》2022年第5期489-504,共16页神经科学通报（英文版）

基　　金：This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61773259,31471081,61773256,62073221,and 61971280).

摘　　要：Studies have shown that spatial attention remarkably affects the trial-to-trial response variability shared between neurons.Difficulty in the attentional task adjusts how much concentration we maintain on what is currently important and what is filtered as irrelevant sensory information.However,how task difficulty mediates the interactions between neurons with separated receptive fields(RFs)that are attended to or attended away is still not clear.We examined spike count correlations between single-unit activities recorded simultaneously in the primary visual cortex(V1)while monkeys performed a spatial attention task with two levels of difficulty.Moreover,the RFs of the two neurons recorded were non-overlapping to allow us to study fluctuations in the correlated responses between competing visual inputs when the focus of attention was allocated to the RF of one neuron.While increasing difficulty in the spatial attention task,spike count correlations were either decreased to become negative between neuronal pairs,implying competition among them,with one neuron(or none)exhibiting attentional enhancement of firing rate,or increased to become positive,suggesting inter-neuronal cooperation,with one of the pair showing attentional suppression of spiking responses.Besides,the modulation of spike count correlations by task difficulty was independent of the attended locations.These findings provide evidence that task difficulty affects the functional interactions between different neuronal pools in V1 when selective attention resolves the spatial competition.

关 键 词：Rhesus monkey Spatial attention Shared variability Attentional load Primary visual cortex 

分 类 号：R338[医药卫生—人体生理学]