The physiology of attention: participation of cat striate cortex in behavioral choice.
In the awake, behaving cat, we have compared response of striate cortex neurons to informative and to noninformative stimuli. A cat pressed a pedal in response to a flashed pattern repeated every 10 s, receiving a reward if the press was within a 0.5-1.5-s post-stimulus window. There were three trial types: 50% of the trials had only the initial informative flash, 25% had an additional physically identical, but unrewarded, flash 500 ms after the first, and 25% had an unrewarded flash 3-5 s after the informative flash. Cats learned to respond only to the rewarded flashes. Neurons were divided into two categories: 27 neurons defined as "primary" showed an early burst of firing 30-70 ms after stimulus onset, and 17 did not. The distinction was arbitrary, since all cells were exposed to the same stimulus. For stimuli preceding a pedal press, stimulus-synchronized histograms of primary neurons had a smaller early burst and more firing before and after it. Response-synchronized histograms showed an abrupt decrease in firing shortly before the pedal press. The effects were stronger for primary cells in the stimulus-synchronized data and stronger for non-primary cells in the response-synchronized data.
Artim
J
J
Bridgeman
B
B
D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002415:Cats; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003216:Conditioning, Operant / Q000502:physiology; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012201:Reward; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology