Attention stabilizes the shared gain of V4 populations
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Responses of sensory neurons represent stimulus information, but are also influenced by internal state. For example, when monkeys direct their attention to a visual stimulus, the response gain of specific subsets of neurons in visual cortex changes. Here, we develop a functional model of population activity to investigate the structure of this effect. We fit the model to the spiking activity of bilateral neural populations in area V4, recorded while the animal performed a stimulus discrimination task under spatial attention. The model reveals four separate time-varying shared modulatory signals, the dominant two of which each target task-relevant neurons in one hemisphere. In attention-directed conditions, the associated shared modulatory signal decreases in variance. This finding provides an interpretable and parsimonious explanation for previous observations that attention reduces variability and noise correlations of sensory neurons. Finally, the recovered modulatory signals reflect previous reward, and are predictive of subsequent choice behavior.
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Experiments and computational models demonstrate that attention amplifies and stabilizes target cell responses, reducing their variance across trials.
“Experiments and computational models further demonstrate that attention amplifies and stabilizes target cell responses, reducing their variance across trials50,51.”
From Mechanisms underlying gain modulation in the cortex (2020) · cites this paper as [51]
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- Authors
- Rabinowitz, N. C., Goris, R. L., Cohen, M., & Simoncelli, E. P.
- Affiliations
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rabinowitz, Neil C
- Simoncelli, Eero P
- Venue
- eLife
- Publisher
- eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
- Published
- 2015-11-02
- Volume
- 4
- Pages
- e08998-e08998
- ISSN
- 2050-084X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4758958
- OpenAlex
- W1961971483
- Cited by
- 194
- References
- 81
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 22 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 12.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- eLife (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Institutes of Health (4R00EY020844-03, R01 EY022930)
- Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation
- Simons Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Research Fellowship)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural dynamics and brain function
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Keywords
- visual attention, area V4, population coding, noise correlation, internal state, spiking activity, functional model, reward prediction, choice behavior, hemispheric lateralization
- MeSH terms
- Action Potentials, Animals, Haplorhini, Attention, Models, Neurological, Perception, Sensory Receptor Cells
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