CAREER: Neural Mechanisms of Learning to Attend

这个世界充满了感官信息，让我们的感官充斥着视觉、声音和气味。为了避免被淹没，我们必须过滤这些感官信息流，把注意力集中在对我们当前目标最重要的事情上。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，什么是干扰因素？这个项目探讨了我们如何学习处理任务相关信息的基本问题。通过对注意力的深入理解，我们的工作将为提高对患有注意力缺陷障碍的个体的诊断和治疗奠定基础。这些研究目标伴随着一个互补的教育计划，将吸引K-12和本科生在好奇心驱动的，互动的研究经验，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”，该模板代表了在特定情况下与之相关的信息。注意模板表现在大脑的前额叶和顶叶皮层，并通过自上而下的连接，对感觉皮层的感觉表征产生偏差。这使得大脑可以选择性地增加与任务相关的刺激的神经表征，减少分散注意力的刺激的表征。通过这种方式，注意模板允许我们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在学习良好的视觉任务中模板获得后的注意机制。目前的项目将以这项工作为基础，使用新颖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）作为模型生物来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。第一个研究目标是通过同时记录猴子反复学习新的注意模板时前额叶和顶叶皮层的神经活动，了解前额叶和顶叶皮层在学习新的注意模板中的作用。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，视觉刺激是在一个连续的“认知地图”中呈现的，该地图代表了神经空间中不同维度的不同视觉特征。实验将验证这样一种假设，即注意力通过“扭曲”神经空间来改变这种认知地图，从而使被关注的特征得到更强烈的表现。这将通过分析新的注意模板如何改变神经群中刺激的表征，以及它们如何改变视觉注意网络中区域之间的动态功能连接来研究。这些非人类灵长类动物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在神经元和大脑网络水平上对学习、注意力和认知的神经相关性有更深入的了解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.