Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 209, 1 April 2020, 116517
NeuroImage

Neuronal population correlates of target selection and distractor filtering

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116517Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We apply machine learning to prefrontal FEF neuronal population activity

  • We provide precise signal trial estimates of reported stimulus location

  • Distance of estimate to actual stimulus location predicts response speed & accuracy

  • This is evidence that perception is associated with a spatial localization error

  • The closer attention to visual stimulus, the lower spatial perception error

  • Spatial attention orientation error does not fully predict spatial perception error

Abstract

Frontal Eye Field (FEF) neurons discriminate between relevant and irrelevant visual stimuli and their response magnitude predicts conscious perception. How this is reflected in the spatial representation of a visual stimulus at the neuronal population level is unknown. We recorded neuronal population activity in the FEF while monkeys were performing a forced choice cued detection task with identical target and distractor stimuli. We quantified, using machine learning techniques, estimates of target and distractor location from FEF population multiunit activities. We found that the FEF population activity provides a precise single trial estimate of reported stimuli locations. Importantly, the closer this prefrontal population single trial estimate is to the veridical stimulus location, the higher the probability that the target or the distractor is reported as perceived. We show that stimulus perception is rescued by the estimate of attention allocation specifically when the latter is close enough to the actual stimulus location, thus indicating a partial independence between attention and perception. Overall, we thus show that how and what we perceive of our environment depends on the spatial precision with which this environment is coded by prefrontal neuronal populations.

Keywords

Frontal eye fields
Neuronal population
Perception
Decoding
Target selection
Distractor filtering
Spatial processing

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