Perceptual And Motor Decisions In The Primate Brain

灵长类动物大脑的感知和运动决策

• 批准号: 7141737
• 负责人: Kirk G Thompson
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: NATIONAL EYE INSTITUTE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 至
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7141737
• 关键词: Macaca; attention; behavioral /social science research tag; decision making; eye movements; neural information processing; neuropsychology; perception; prefrontal lobe /cortex; saccades; sensory discrimination; visual fields; visual perception

My research interest is to understand how subjective perception and voluntary motor actions emerge from brain activity. My main approach is to record neural activity in the brains of monkeys performing various visual search and forced-choice discrimination tasks. Most of my research has focused on the frontal eye field, which is located in the prefrontal cortex and participates in the transformation of visual information into commands to move the eyes. The goal this project is to understand how we make perceptual decisions, choose where to direct gaze and to understand the neural basis of directed visual attention. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the frontal eye field functions as a visual salience map, a topographic representation of the relative importance of every object in the visual scene, for the purpose guiding attention and eye movements (reviewed in ref. 1). We hypothesize that the salience map in the frontal eye field corresponds to the salience map featured in many theoretical models of directed spatial attention and saccade target selection. As predicted by the theoretical models, we showed that the pattern of activity across the frontal eye field not only identifies the target of the next saccade, but also corresponds to the behavioral probability of making a saccade choice in visual search tasks with varying difficulty (ref. 2). This is accomplished by integrating the bottom-up physical salience present in the visual scene with the top-down knowledge and goals of the viewer (ref. 2). One of the outstanding questions of cognitive neuroscience is how we are able to focus visual attention on specific objects and locations without moving our eyes. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the spatially selective activity in the frontal eye field that precedes saccades is dissociated from the production of eye movements (reviewed in ref. 3). We have extended this evidence to show that the activity of visually responsive neurons in the frontal eye field, but not saccade related movement neurons, corresponds to the locus of covert spatial attention without any evidence of saccade planning (ref. 4). These studies have extended our understanding about the frontal eye field far beyond its familiar role in controlling eye movements. With this knowledge we can design experiments to investigate the flow of sensory information through the brain as it is transformed into perception and action. This work helps us understand the mechanisms of how the brain focuses attention to make perceptual decisions and guide behavior, which is necessary to be able to understand and treat attention-related disorders in humans.

我的研究兴趣是了解主观的感知和自愿运动动作如何从大脑活动中产生。我的主要方法是记录执行各种视觉搜索和强制选择歧视任务的猴子大脑中的神经活动。我的大多数研究都集中在额叶的额叶视野上，该视野位于前额叶皮层中，并参与将视觉信息转换为命令以移动眼睛的命令。该项目的目标是了解我们如何做出感知决策，选择指导凝视的地方并了解直接视觉关注的神经基础。 我们的实验结果表明，额眼场充当视觉显着图，这是每个对象在视觉场景中相对重要性的地形表示，目的是指导注意力和眼睛运动（参见参考文献1）。我们假设额眼场中的显着图对应于许多定向空间注意力和扫视目标选择的理论模型中所介绍的显着图。正如理论模型所预测的那样，我们表明，跨眼场的活动模式不仅标识了下一个扫视的目标，而且还对应于在视觉搜索任务中具有不同难度的视觉搜索任务中选择扫视选择的行为概率（参考文献2）。这是通过将视觉场景中存在的自下而上的身体显着性与观众的自上而下的知识和目标（参考文献2）结合在一起来完成的。 认知神经科学的杰出问题之一是，我们能够在不动眼睛的情况下将视觉注意力集中在特定对象和位置上。多种证据表明，在扫视之前的额叶视野中具有空间选择性活性与眼运动的产生分离（参见参考文献3）。我们已经扩展了这一证据，以表明视觉响应式神经元在额眼场中的活性，而不是与扫视相关的运动神经元的活动，对应于秘密空间关注的轨迹，而没有任何扫视计划的证据（参考文献4）。 这些研究扩展了我们对额眼场的理解，远远超出了其在控制眼动运动中熟悉的作用。有了这些知识，我们可以设计实验，以研究感觉信息通过大脑转化为感知和动作的流动。这项工作有助于我们了解大脑如何将注意力集中在做出感知决策和指导行为的机制，这对于能够理解和治疗人类的注意力相关的疾病是必不可少的。