CAREER: Neural Mechanisms of Learning to Attend

这个世界充满了感官信息，视觉、声音和气味充斥着我们的感官。为了避免不知所措，我们必须过滤这些感官信息流，专注于对我们当前目标最重要的事情。注意力使我们能够专注于与我们最相关的刺激，而忽略分散注意力的刺激。但是，在给定的任务或情况下，我们如何学习什么是相关的，什么是干扰物？这个项目探讨了我们如何学习关注与任务相关的信息的基本问题。通过提供对注意力的更深入理解，我们的工作将为改善与注意力缺陷障碍作斗争的个人的诊断和治疗奠定基础。这些研究目标伴随着一项补充教育计划，该计划将让K-12和本科生参与好奇心驱动的互动研究体验，以研究注意力如何影响他们的日常生活。先前的研究表明，视觉注意力依赖于一个“注意力模板”，它代表了在给定情况下哪些信息是相关的。注意力模板在大脑的前额叶和顶叶皮层中表现出来，并通过自上而下的连接来影响感觉皮层中的感觉表征。这允许大脑选择性地增加任务相关刺激的神经表征，并减少分心刺激的表征。通过这种方式，注意模板使我们能够将认知资源集中在与任务相关的刺激上。早期的研究已经调查了注意的机制后，模板已获得良好的学习视觉任务。目前的项目将建立在这项工作的基础上，使用新的实验任务来研究大脑如何发现相关内容并学习适当的注意力模板。本项目将利用非人类灵长类动物（猕猴）作为模式生物，研究注意力和认知的神经基础，为人类认知提供启示和见解。第一个研究目标是了解前额叶和顶叶皮层在学习新的注意力模板中的作用，同时记录前额叶和顶叶皮层的神经活动，而猴子反复学习新的注意力模板。第二个研究目标是了解学习一个新的注意力模板如何改变或“扭曲”前额叶和视觉皮层中刺激的高维神经表征。最近的研究表明，视觉刺激表示在一个连续的“认知地图”，代表不同的视觉功能沿着不同的维度在神经空间。 实验将测试这一假设，即注意力通过“扭曲”神经空间来改变这一认知地图，从而使关注的特征更强烈地表现出来。这将通过分析新的注意力模板如何改变神经群体中刺激的表征，以及它们如何改变视觉注意力网络中区域之间的动态功能连接来研究。这些在非人类灵长类动物中的实验结果将与人类注意力的平行研究相结合。这些实验的结果有望加深对学习，注意力，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

The world is brimming with sensory information, flooding our senses with sights and sounds and smells. To avoid being overwhelmed, we must filter this stream of sensory information and focus on what is most important for our current goals. Attention allows us to focus on stimuli that are most relevant to us while ignoring distracting stimuli. But, how do we learn, in a given task or situation, what is relevant and what is a distractor? This project explores the fundamental question of how we learn to attend to task-relevant information. By providing a deeper understanding of attention, our work will lay the foundation for improving diagnoses and treatments of individuals who struggle with attention-deficit disorders. These research goals are accompanied by a complementary educational plan will engage K-12 and undergraduate students in curiosity-driven, interactive research experiences to study how attention affects their everyday lives. Previous work suggests that visual attention relies on an ‘attentional template’ that represents what information is relevant in a given situation. Attentional templates are represented in prefrontal and parietal cortex in the brain and act, through top-down connections, to bias sensory representations in sensory cortex. This allows the brain to selectively increase the neural representation of task-relevant stimuli and reduce the representation of distracting stimuli. In this way, attentional templates allow us to focus our cognitive resources on task-relevant stimuli. Earlier studies have investigated the mechanisms of attention after the template has been acquired in well-learned visual tasks. The current project will build on this work, using novel experimental tasks to study how the brain discovers what is relevant and learns the appropriate attentional template. This project will utilize a non-human primate (the macaque monkey) as a model organism to study the neural basis of attention and cognition yielding implications and insights for human cognition. A first research goal is to understand the role of prefrontal and parietal cortex in learning new attentional templates by simultaneously recording neural activity from both prefrontal and parietal cortex while monkeys repeatedly learn new attentional templates. A second research goal is to understand how learning a new attentional template transforms or ‘warps’ the high-dimensional neural representation of stimuli in prefrontal and visual cortex. Recent work has suggested visual stimuli are represented in a continuous ‘cognitive map’ that represents different visual features along different dimensions in neural space. Experiments will test the hypothesis that attention alters this cognitive map by ‘warping’ neural space such that attended features are represented more strongly. This will be studied by analyzing how new attentional templates change the representations of stimuli in the neural population, and how they alter the dynamic functional connectivity between regions in the visual attention network. The results of these experiments in non-human primates will be integrated with parallel studies of attention in humans.The results of these experiments promise to lead to a deeper understanding of the neural correlates of learning, attention, and cognition at both a neuronal and a brain network level.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.