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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 7, 2004, 24(27):6106-6114; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1459-04.2004

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
The Influence of Sustained Selective Attention on Stimulus Selectivity in Macaque Visual Area MT

Detlef Wegener,¹ Winrich A. Freiwald,^1,2,3 and Andreas K. Kreiter¹

¹Brain Research Institute, Center for Cognitive and Emotional Sciences, University of Bremen, D-28334 Bremen, Germany, ²Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, and ³Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

Remarkable alterations of perception during long-lasting attentional processes have been described in several recent studies. Although these findings have gained much interest, almost nothing is known about the modulation of neuronal responses during sustained attention. Therefore, we investigated the effect of prolonged selective attention on neuronal feature selectivity. Awake macaque monkeys were trained to perform a motion-tracking task that required attending one of two simultaneously presented moving bars for up to 15 sec. Extracellular recordings were obtained from neurons in macaque motion-sensitive middle temporal visual area (MT/V5). Under conditions of attention, we found high and constant direction selectivity over time. This was expressed by a strong and persistent response contrast between presentations of preferred and nonpreferred stimuli in successive motion cycles. With attention directed to another moving bar, neuronal responses to the behaviorally irrelevant stimulus became continuously less specific for the direction of motion. In particular, increasingly higher firing rates for motion in null direction caused a strong reduction of direction selectivity, which further increased with enhanced proximity between target and distracter bar. A passive condition experiment revealed that this reduction occurred only when motion remained the behaviorally relevant feature but disappeared when attention was withdrawn from this feature domain. Thus, sustained attention seems to stabilize direction selectivity of neurons in area MT against a time and competition-dependent degradation, whereas nonattended objects suffer from a reduced neuronal representation.

Key words: macaque monkey; vision; MT; attention; direction selectivity; neurophysiology

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Received April 19, 2004; revised May 21, 2004; accepted May 22, 2004.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				T. Williford and J. H. R. Maunsell Effects of spatial attention on contrast response functions in macaque area v4. J Neurophysiol, July 1, 2006; 96(1): 40 - 54. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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