Attention and Voluntary Action in Prefrontal Cortex

描述(由申请人提供)：预测和计划是行为的重要方面，涉及在前额叶皮质执行的计算。视觉引导行为通常发生在运动中的对象可能被其他对象临时遮挡的动态环境中。预测移动目标未来位置的能力对于控制自主移动非常重要。人类和猴子能够相当准确地推断出目标的运动，即使目标暂时不可见。这种能力可能依赖于注意力和工作记忆的相互作用，以维持对看不见的目标的动态心理表征。由于前额叶皮质参与工作记忆、计划和眼动控制，也接受视觉皮质运动处理区域的传入投射，因此我们有动力研究前额叶皮质在轨迹估计中的作用。我们计划了三个实验来研究弹道估计过程中目标运动的内部表征。首先，我们将使用微刺激来探测隐形目标跟踪过程中眼跳计划的更新。其次，我们将进行定量的视觉感受野映射，以跟踪任务过程中的空间注意轨迹。最后，我们将使用匹配/非匹配范式来确定前额叶神经元对可预测和意外目标运动的反应是否不同。这些实验将阐明注意力和工作记忆在短期预测中的相互作用。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Prediction and planning are important aspects of behavior that involve computations performed in prefrontal cortex. Visually guided behavior generally occurs in a dynamic environment where objects in motion may be temporarily occluded by other objects. The ability to predict the future location of a moving target is important for controlling voluntary movements. Humans and monkeys are able to extrapolate target motion fairly accurately even when the target is rendered temporarily invisible. This ability may depend on attention and working memory interacting to maintain a dynamic mental representation of the invisible target. Because prefrontal cortex is involved in working memory, planning, and eye movement control, and also receives afferent projections from motion processing areas in visual cortex, we are motivated to investigate the role of prefrontal cortex in trajectory estimation. We plan three experiments to investigate the internal representation of target motion during trajectory estimation. First, we will use micro-stimulation to probe the updating of saccade plans during invisible target tracking. Second, we will perform quantitative visual receptive field mapping to track the locus of spatial attention during the task. Finally, we will use a match/non-match paradigm to determine if prefrontal neurons respond differently to predictable versus unexpected target motions. These experiments will shed light on the interaction of attention and working memory for short-range prediction.