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，涉及前额叶皮层中执行的计算。视觉引导行为通常发生在动态环境中，其中运动中的对象可能暂时被其他对象遮挡。预测移动目标未来位置的能力对于控制随意运动是重要的。人类和猴子能够相当准确地推断目标运动，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，以保持对无形目标的动态心理表征。由于前额叶皮层参与工作记忆、计划和眼动控制，并且还接收来自视觉皮层运动处理区域的传入投射，因此我们有动机研究前额叶皮层在轨迹估计中的作用。我们计划了三个实验来研究在轨迹估计过程中目标运动的内部表示。首先，我们将使用微刺激来探讨在不可见目标追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来跟踪任务过程中的空间注意轨迹。最后，我们将使用匹配/非匹配范例来确定前额叶神经元是否对可预测与意外的目标运动做出不同的反应。这些实验将揭示注意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.