Attentional control by uncertainty and reward: parietal and frontal mechanisms

不确定性和奖励的注意力控制：顶叶和额叶机制

• 批准号: 8473286
• 负责人: Jacqueline Gottlieb
• 金额: $ 38.4万
• 依托单位: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-06-01 至 2017-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8473286
• 关键词: Accounting; Address; Affect; Animals; Area; Attention; Attention Deficit Disorder; Behavioral; Brain; Brain Diseases; Cognitive; Commit; Complex; Cues; Decision Making; Discrimination; Disease; Eye Movements; Family; Future; Goals; Health; Human; Individual; Lead; Learning; Lesion; Link; Macaca mulatta; Machine Learning; Mental Depression; Mental disorders; Monkeys; Neurons; Organism; Parietal; Parietal Lobe; Perception; Physiological; Probability; Process; Property; Rattus; Relative (related person); Resources; Rewards; Rodent; Role; Sensory; Signal Transduction; Source; Stimulus; System; Testing; Uncertainty; Visual; Visual attention; Weight; addiction; attentional modulation; base; clinically significant; directed attention; discounting; expectation; extrastriate visual cortex; frontal eye fields; frontal lobe; improved; innovation; lateral intraparietal area; nonhuman primate; novel; oculomotor; relating to nervous system; response; selective attention; theories

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To act adaptively in complex worlds, animals require the ability identify relevant information, which helps improve their predictions and reduce the uncertainty of future actions. The selection of relevant information is accomplished by systems of attention, which have been intensively investigated in the visual domain. These studies have focused on attentional modulations of sensory perception and on mechanisms of oculomotor target selection. However, less is known about the cognitive mechanisms of attentional control: how does the brain identify stimuli that are "relevant" or "attention worthy" in a given task? Evidence from computational and behavioral studies suggests that relevance depends both on the reward associations and on the informational properties of a sensory cue. However, informational properties (uncertainty, new information) are investigated mostly in studies of learning, while studies of oculomotor control focus on the role of reward. Thus it is unknown how the brain computes relevance based on both the reward and informational constraints of a task. In the oculomotor system, two areas implicated in attentional control are the frontal eye field (FEF) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP). However, studies of these areas have focused on their role in target selection rather than computing relevance per se. In addition, these studies reveal very similar responses in FEF and LIP, raising questions regarding their specific roles. Here we aim to answer these questions by using a combination of single neuron recordings and reversible inactivation and explicitly comparing FEF and LIP. We seek to understand (1) how is target selection in FEF and LIP influenced by reliability/uncertainty and redundancy/new information, (2) how are these variables related to expected reward and (3) whether LIP/FEF have distinct contributions to discounting redundant information and attending to reliable versus uncertain cues. The studies are innovative in that they link two topics that have been pursued in isolation, the study of attention on one hand and that of learning and statistical inference on the other, and directly compare the functions of FEF and LIP. The studies have high clinical significance since attentional disturbances are strong in many psychiatric disorders including attention deficit disorder, depression and addiction. Thus, the studies will lead to an integrated theory of attentional control based on reward and uncertainty reduction, processes that are core for decision making in both health and disease.

描述（由申请人提供）：为了适应复杂的世界，动物需要识别相关信息的能力，这有助于提高它们的预测能力，减少未来行动的不确定性。相关信息的选择是由注意力系统完成的，这在视觉领域已经得到了深入的研究。这些研究主要集中在感觉知觉的注意调节和动眼肌目标选择的机制上。然而，人们对注意力控制的认知机制知之甚少：在给定的任务中，大脑如何识别“相关”或“值得注意”的刺激？来自计算和行为研究的证据表明，相关性既取决于奖励关联，也取决于感官线索的信息特性。然而，信息属性（不确定性、新信息）的研究主要集中在学习研究中，而动眼肌控制的研究主要集中在奖励的作用上。因此，我们不知道大脑是如何根据任务的奖励和信息约束来计算相关性的。在动眼病系统中，有两个与注意力控制有关的区域是额眼区（FEF）和外侧顶叶内区（LIP）。然而，这些领域的研究主要集中在它们在目标选择中的作用，而不是计算相关性本身。此外，这些研究揭示了FEF和LIP非常相似的反应，提出了关于它们的具体作用的问题。在这里，我们的目标是通过使用单神经元记录和可逆失活的组合来回答这些问题，并明确比较FEF和LIP。我们试图理解(1)FEF和LIP中的目标选择如何受到可靠性/不确定性和冗余/新信息的影响，(2)这些变量如何与预期奖励相关，以及(3)LIP/FEF是否在贴现冗余信息和关注可靠与不确定线索方面有不同的贡献。这些研究具有创新性，因为它们将两个孤立研究的主题联系起来，一方面是对注意力的研究，另一方面是对学习和统计推断的研究