Frontal Mechanisms of Visuomotor Control

 描述(申请人提供)：在日常生活中，一个人使用感官信息和注意力来选择适当的行动。很多时候，我们认为感官信息“指导”了我们的选择，从而产生了一种直觉，即感知和行动是连续运行的。了解大脑连接这些过程的大脑皮层机制，以及空间注意力在多大程度上影响从感觉到运动活动的移交，对于理解知觉决策的前额控制至关重要。先前的研究发现，在简单的检测任务中，灵长类前额眼区的视觉神经元在运动动作之前选择目标。实验室 然而，斯坦福大学和萨利纳斯的研究表明，当知觉歧视被置于紧急决策任务的背景下时，运动活动与知觉同步发展。这项拟议的研究旨在使用紧急决策范式和注意探测相结合的方法，应用于不同注意需求的任务，以调查视觉和运动活动的时间相关性，以及注意偏差的影响。这项研究使用了单个单位的电生理记录，这些记录来自行为清醒的恒河猴，它们执行着一系列眼跳运动任务。这些录音被用来比较需要内源性和外源性注意分配的任务的简易和紧急版本之间的活动。有了这些数据，就可以在不同的情况下探索感知信息到运动反应的演变，以及注意力所起的调制作用。这项研究将对理解知觉决策的神经基础、反应选择和知觉加工的注意调节具有重要意义。阐明负责连接注意力、知觉和行动的神经机制对于彻底了解许多与产生目标驱动行为的能力中断相关的病理情况是至关重要的，包括帕金森氏症、精神分裂症、忽视、中风和各种其他认知障碍。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In daily life, one uses sensory information and attention to select appropriate actions. Very often, we think of sensory information as "guiding" our choices, leading to the intuition that perception and action operate serially. Understanding the cortical mechanisms by which the brain links these processes, and to what extent spatial attention affects the handoff from sensory to motor activity, is crucial to understanding frontal control of perceptual decision making. Previous studies have found that in simple detection tasks, visual neurons in the primate frontal eye fields select targets before motor action. The lab of Stanford and Salinas, however, has demonstrated that when perceptual discrimination is couched in the context of an urgent-decision task, motor activity evolves simultaneously with perception. The proposed research is designed to use an urgent-decision paradigm combined with an attentional probe, applied across tasks of differing attentional demands, to investigate the temporal correlates of visual and motor activity, as well as the effect of attentional bias. Ths work uses single-unit electrophysiological recordings from awake-behaving rhesus monkeys performing a series of saccadic eye-movement tasks. These recordings are used to compare activity between easy and urgent versions of tasks requiring endogenous and exogenous attentional allocation. With this data, the evolution of the perceptual information into motor response, and whatever modulatory effect attention has, can be explored for a variety circumstances. The proposed study will have valuable implications for the understanding of the neural basis of perceptual decision, response selection, and attentional modulation of perceptual processing. Elucidating the neural mechanisms responsible for linking attention, perception, and action is fundamental to a thorough understanding of many pathological conditions associated with disruptions in the ability to produce goal-driven behaviors, including Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, neglect, stroke, and various other cognitive disorders.