Cortical depth dependent population receptive field attraction by spatial attention in human V1

SummaryGrowing evidence suggests that distributed spatial attention may invoke theta (3-9 Hz) rhythmic sampling processes. The neuronal basis of such attentional sampling is however not fully understood. Here we show using array recordings in visual cortical area V4 of two awake macaques that presenting separate visual stimuli to the excitatory center and suppressive surround of neuronal receptive fields elicits rhythmic multi-unit activity (MUA) at 3-6 Hz. This neuronal rhythm did not depend on small fixational eye movements. In the context of a distributed spatial attention task, during which the monkeys detected a spatially and temporally uncertain target, reaction times (RT) exhibited similar rhythmic fluctuations. RTs were fast or slow depending on the target occurrence during high or low MUA, resulting in rhythmic MUA-RT cross-correlations at at theta frequencies. These findings suggest that theta-rhythmic neuronal activity arises from competitive receptive field interactions and that this rhythm may subserve attentional sampling.HighlightsCenter-surround interactions induce theta-rhythmic MUA of visual cortex neuronsThe MUA rhythm does not depend on small fixational eye movementsReaction time fluctuations lock to the neuronal rhythm under distributed attention

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Attentional Modulation of Visual Responses by Flexible Input Gain

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.90654.2008 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 101 (4) ◽

pp. 2089-2106 ◽

Cited By ~ 30

Author(s):

Geoffrey M. Ghose

Keyword(s):

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Sensory Integration ◽

Suppressive Effect ◽

Common Mechanism ◽

Visual Responses ◽

Attentional Modulation ◽

Low Contrast ◽

Imaging Results ◽

Input Gain

Although it is clear that sensory responses in the cortex can be strongly modulated by stimuli outside of classical receptive fields as well as by extraretinal signals such as attention and anticipation, the exact rules governing the neuronal integration of sensory and behavioral signals remain unclear. For example, most experiments studying sensory interactions have not explored attention, while most studies of attention have relied on the responses to relatively limited sets of stimuli. However, a recent study of V4 responses, in which location, orientation, and spatial attention were systematically varied, suggests that attention can both facilitate and suppress specific sensory inputs to a neuron according to behavioral relevance. To explore the implications of such input gain, we modeled the effects of a center-surround organization of attentional modulation using existing receptive field models of sensory integration. The model is consistent with behavioral measurements of a suppressive effect that surrounds the facilitatory locus of spatial attention. When this center-surround modulation is incorporated into realistic models of sensory integration, it is able to explain seemingly disparate observations of attentional effects in the neurophysiological literature, including spatial shifts in receptive field position and the preferential modulation of low contrast stimuli. The model is also consistent with recent formulations of attention to features in which gain is variably applied among cells with different receptive field properties. Consistent with functional imaging results, the model predicts that spatial attention effects will vary between different visual areas and suggests that attention may act through a common mechanism of selective and flexible gain throughout the visual system.

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The effects of spatial attention and population receptive field size estimation on fMRI topographic mapping signals

Journal of Vision ◽

10.1167/8.6.803 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 8 (6) ◽

pp. 803-803

Author(s):

D. Bressler ◽

M. Silver

Keyword(s):

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Field Size ◽

Topographic Mapping ◽

Size Estimation ◽

Receptive Field Size

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FSRFNet: Feature-Selective and Spatial Receptive Fields Networks

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app9193954 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (19) ◽

pp. 3954 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ma ◽

Yang ◽

Yu

Keyword(s):

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

Cortical Neurons ◽

Network Architecture ◽

Receptive Fields ◽

Field Size ◽

Visual Cortical ◽

Neuroscience Community ◽

Architectural Unit

The attention mechanism plays a crucial role in the human visual experience. In the cognitive neuroscience community, the receptive field size of visual cortical neurons is regulated by the additive effect of feature-selective and spatial attention. We propose a novel architectural unit called a “Feature-selective and Spatial Receptive Fields” (FSRF) block that implements adaptive receptive field sizes of neurons through the additive effects of feature-selective and spatial attention. We show that FSRF blocks can be inserted into the architecture of existing convolutional neural networks to form an FSRF network architecture, and test its generalization capabilities on different datasets.

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Allocation of attention across saccades

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00656.2012 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 109 (5) ◽

pp. 1425-1434 ◽

Cited By ~ 45

Author(s):

Donatas Jonikaitis ◽

Martin Szinte ◽

Martin Rolfs ◽

Patrick Cavanagh

Keyword(s):

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Discrimination Task ◽

Retinal Location ◽

Retinal Position ◽

Visual Neurons ◽

Attentional Allocation ◽

The World ◽

Before And After ◽

Spatial Locations

Whenever the eyes move, spatial attention must keep track of the locations of targets as they shift on the retina. This study investigated transsaccadic updating of visual attention to cued targets. While observers prepared a saccade, we flashed an irrelevant, but salient, color cue in their visual periphery and measured the allocation of spatial attention before and after the saccade using a tilt discrimination task. We found that just before the saccade, attention was allocated to the cue's future retinal location, its predictively “remapped” location. Attention was sustained at the cue's location in the world across the saccade, despite the change of retinal position whereas it decayed quickly at the retinal location of the cue, after the eye landed. By extinguishing the color cue across the saccade, we further demonstrate that the visual system relies only on predictive allocation of spatial attention, as the presence of the cue after the saccade did not substantially affect attentional allocation. These behavioral results support and extend physiological evidence showing predictive activation of visual neurons when an attended stimulus will fall in their receptive field after a saccade. Our results show that tracking of spatial locations across saccades is a plausible consequence of physiological remapping.

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Mechanisms for shaping receptive field in monkey area TE

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00348.2017 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 118 (4) ◽

pp. 2448-2457 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Keitaro Obara ◽

Kazunori O’Hashi ◽

Manabu Tanifuji

Keyword(s):

Visual Field ◽

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Response Latency ◽

Visual Pathway ◽

Dependent Manner ◽

Dynamic Component ◽

Dynamic Mechanisms ◽

Ventral Visual Pathway ◽

Area Te

Visual object information is conveyed from V1 to area TE along the ventral visual pathway with increasing receptive field (RF) sizes. The RFs of TE neurons are known to be large, but it is largely unknown how large RFs are shaped along the ventral visual pathway. In this study, we addressed this question in two aspects, static and dynamic mechanisms, by recording neural responses from macaque area TE and V4 to object stimuli presented at various locations in the visual field. As a component related to static mechanisms, we found that in area TE, but not in V4, response latency to objects presented at fovea were different from objects in periphery. As a component of the dynamic mechanisms, we examined effects of spatial attention on the RFs of TE neurons. Spatial attention did not affect response latency but modulated response magnitudes depending on attended location, shifting of the longitudinal axis of RFs toward the attended locations. In standard models of large RF formation, downstream neurons pool information from nearby RFs, and this process is repeated across the visual field and at each step along the ventral visual pathway. The present study revealed that this mechanism is not that simple: 1) different circuit mechanisms for foveal and peripheral visual fields may be situated between V4 and area TE, and 2) spatial attention dynamically changes the shape of RFs. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Receptive fields (RFs) of neurons are progressively increased along the ventral visual pathway so that an RF at the final stage, area TE, covers a large area of the visual field. We explored the mechanism and suggested involvement of parallel circuit mechanisms between V4 and TE for foveal and peripheral parts of visual field. We also found a dynamic component of RF shape formation through attentional modulation of responses in a location-dependent manner.

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Spatial summation in macaque parietal area 7a follows a winner-take-all rule

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00907.2010 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 105 (3) ◽

pp. 1150-1158 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Anna Oleksiak ◽

P. Christiaan Klink ◽

Albert Postma ◽

Ineke J. M. van der Ham ◽

Martin J. Lankheet ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Receptive Field ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Posterior Parietal Cortex ◽

Temporal Dynamics ◽

Spatial Summation ◽

Parietal Area ◽

Area 7A ◽

Summation Rule ◽

Winner Take All ◽

Take All

While neurons in posterior parietal cortex have been found to signal the presence of a salient stimulus among multiple items in a display, spatial summation within their receptive field in the absence of an attentional bias has never been investigated. This information, however, is indispensable when one investigates the mechanisms of spatial attention and competition between multiple visual objects. To examine the spatial summation rule in parietal area 7a neurons, we trained rhesus monkeys to fixate on a central cross while two identical stimuli were briefly displayed in a neuron's receptive field. The response to a pair of dots was compared with the responses to the same dots when they were presented individually. The scaling and power parameters of a generalized summation algorithm varied greatly, both across neurons and across combinations of stimulus locations. However, the averaged response of the recorded population of 7a neurons was consistent with a winner-take-all rule for spatial summation. A control experiment where a monkey covertly attended to both stimuli simultaneously suggests that attention introduces additional competition by facilitating the less optimal stimulus. Thus an averaging stage is introduced between ∼200 and 300 ms of the response to a pair of stimuli. In short, the summation algorithm over the population of area 7a neurons carries the signature of a winner-take-all operation, with spatial attention possibly influencing the temporal dynamics of stimulus competition, that is the moment that the “winner” takes “victory” over the “loser” stimulus.

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