Attentional deficits are core to numerous developmental, neurological, and psychiatric disorders. At the single-cell level, much knowledge has been garnered from studies of shape and spatial properties, as well as from numerous demonstrations of attentional modulation of those properties. Despite this wealth of knowledge of single-cell responses across many brain regions, little is known about how these cellular characteristics relate to population level representations and how such representations relate to behavior; in particular, how these cellular responses relate to the representation of shape, space, and attention, and how these representations differ across cortical areas and streams. Here we will emphasize the role of population coding as a missing link for connecting single-cell properties with behavior. Using a data-driven intrinsic approach to population decoding, we show that both 'what' and 'where' cortical visual streams encode shape, space, and attention, yet demonstrate striking differences in these representations. We suggest that both pathways fully process shape and space, but that differences in representation may arise due to their differing functions and input and output constraints. Moreover, differences in the effects of attention on shape and spatial population representations in the two visual streams suggest two distinct strategies: in a ventral area, attention or task demands modulate the population representations themselves (perhaps to expand or enhance one part at the expense of other parts) while in a dorsal area, at a population representation level, attention effects are weak and nearly non-existent, perhaps in order to maintain veridical representations needed for visuomotor control. We show that an intrinsic approach, as opposed to theory-driven and labeled approaches, is useful for understanding how representations develop and differ across brain regions. Most importantly, these approaches help link cellular properties more tightly with behavior, a much-needed step to better understand and interpret cellular findings and key to providing insights to improve interventions in human disorders.

中文翻译：

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猴子皮层中形状，空间和注意力的表示。

注意缺陷是许多发育，神经和精神疾病的核心。在单细胞水平上，已经从形状和空间特性的研究以及对这些特性的注意力调制的众多演示中获得了很多知识。尽管对许多大脑区域的单细胞反应有丰富的知识，但对于这些细胞特征如何与人群水平表征以及这种表征与行为之间的关系知之甚少。特别是，这些细胞反应如何与形状，空间和注意力的表现有关，以及这些表现在皮质区域和溪流之间如何不同。在这里，我们将强调人口编码作为将单细胞特性与行为联系起来的缺失环节的作用。使用数据驱动的内在方法进行总体解码，我们表明“什么”和“何处”的皮质视觉流都对形状，空间和注意力进行编码，但在这些表示形式上却表现出惊人的差异。我们建议这两种途径都完全处理形状和空间，但是由于它们的功能不同以及输入和输出约束的不同，表示形式上的差异可能会出现。此外，注意力在两个视觉流中对形状和空间种群表示的影响上的差异提出了两种不同的策略：在腹侧区域，注意力或任务需求会自行调节种群表示（可能以牺牲一部分为代价来扩展或增强一部分）其他部分），在背侧地区，在人口代表性水平上，注意力影响微弱，几乎不存在，也许是为了维持视觉运动控制所需的垂直表示。我们表明，与理论驱动和标记方法相反，一种内在方法对于理解表示形式如何在大脑区域内发展和差异是有用的。最重要的是，这些方法有助于将细胞特性与行为更紧密地联系在一起，这是更好地理解和解释细胞发现的急需的步骤，并且是提供洞察力以改善对人类疾病的干预措施的关键。