Object-based attention describes the brain’s capacity to prioritize one set of stimuli while ignoring others. Human research suggests that the binding of diverse stimuli into one attended percept requires phase-locked oscillatory activity in the brain. Even insects display oscillatory brain activity during visual attention tasks, but it is unclear if neural oscillations in insects are selectively correlated to different features of attended objects. We addressed this question by recording local field potentials in the Drosophila central complex, a brain structure involved in visual navigation and decision making. We found that attention selectively increased the neural gain of visual features associated with attended objects and that attention could be redirected to unattended objects by activation of a reward circuit. Attention was associated with increased beta (20- to 30-Hz) oscillations that selectively locked onto temporal features of the attended visual objects. Our results suggest a conserved function for the beta frequency range in regulating selective attention to salient visual features.

基于对象的注意力描述了大脑优先考虑一组刺激而忽略其他刺激的能力。人类研究表明，将不同的刺激结合到一种关注的感知中需要大脑中的锁相振荡活动。即使昆虫在视觉注意任务中也表现出振荡性大脑活动，但尚不清楚昆虫的神经振荡是否选择性地与所关注物体的不同特征相关。我们通过记录果蝇中央复合体的局部场电位来解决这个问题，果蝇中央复合体是一种涉及视觉导航和决策的大脑结构。我们发现，注意力选择性地增加了与被关注物体相关的视觉特征的神经增益，并且可以通过激活奖励回路将注意力重新定向到无人关注的物体。注意力与β（20至30赫兹）振荡的增加有关，选择性地锁定所关注视觉对象的时间特征。我们的结果表明，β 频率范围在调节对显着视觉特征的选择性注意方面具有保守功能。