Frontal Mechanisms of Visuomotor Control

 描述（由申请人提供）：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，我们认为感官信息是“指导”我们的选择，导致直觉认为感知和行动是连续运作的。了解大脑连接这些过程的皮层机制，以及空间注意力在多大程度上影响从感觉活动到运动活动的切换，对于理解知觉决策的额叶控制至关重要。以往的研究发现，在简单的检测任务中，灵长类动物额叶眼野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Salinas教授的研究表明，当知觉辨别被置于紧急决策任务的背景下时，运动活动与知觉同时发展。本研究采用注意探针结合紧急决策范式，在不同注意需求的任务中应用，研究视觉和运动活动的时间相关性，以及注意偏向的影响。这项工作使用单单位电生理记录从清醒行为的恒河猴执行一系列扫视眼球运动任务。这些记录被用来比较活动之间的简单和紧急版本的任务，需要内源性和外源性的注意力分配。有了这些数据，知觉信息到运动反应的演变，以及注意力的调节作用，可以在各种情况下进行探索。 该研究对于理解知觉决策、反应选择和知觉加工的注意调节的神经基础具有重要意义。阐明负责连接注意力、感知和行动的神经机制对于彻底理解与产生目标驱动行为的能力中断相关的许多病理状况是至关重要的，这些病理状况包括帕金森病、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.