Pre-saccadic Neural Enhancements in Marmoset Area MT
Each time we make an eye movement, attention moves before the eyes, resulting in a perceptual enhancement at the target. Recent psychophysical studies suggest that this pre-saccadic attention enhances the visual features at the saccade target, whereas covert attention causes only spatially selective...
Saved in:
Published in | The Journal of neuroscience Vol. 44; no. 4; p. e2034222023 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Society for Neuroscience
24.01.2024
|
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | Each time we make an eye movement, attention moves before the eyes, resulting in a perceptual enhancement at the target. Recent psychophysical studies suggest that this pre-saccadic attention enhances the visual features at the saccade target, whereas covert attention causes only spatially selective enhancements. While previous nonhuman primate studies have found that pre-saccadic attention does enhance neural responses spatially, no studies have tested whether changes in neural tuning reflect an automatic feature enhancement. Here we examined pre-saccadic attention using a saccade foraging task developed for marmoset monkeys (one male and one female). We recorded from neurons in the middle temporal area with peripheral receptive fields that contained a motion stimulus, which would either be the target of a saccade or a distracter as a saccade was made to another location. We established that marmosets, like macaques, show enhanced pre-saccadic neural responses for saccades toward the receptive field, including increases in firing rate and motion information. We then examined if the specific changes in neural tuning might support feature enhancements for the target. Neurons exhibited diverse changes in tuning but predominantly showed additive and multiplicative increases that were uniformly applied across motion directions. These findings confirm that marmoset monkeys, like macaques, exhibit pre-saccadic neural enhancements during saccade foraging tasks with minimal training requirements. However, at the level of individual neurons, the lack of feature-tuned enhancements is similar to neural effects reported during covert spatial attention. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 We thank Dina Graf and members of the Mitchell lab for help with marmoset care and handling. We thank Martin Rolfs and Lisa Kroell for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This work was supported by NIH Grants R01 EY030998 (J.F.M. and S.C.), R00 EY032179 (J.Y.), and T32 EY007125 (S.C.). The authors declare no competing financial interests. Author contributions: S.H.C. and J.F.M. designed research; S.H.C. performed research; S.H.C., J.L.Y., and J.F.M. analyzed data; S.H.C. and J.F.M. wrote the paper. |
ISSN: | 0270-6474 1529-2401 1529-2401 |
DOI: | 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2034-22.2023 |