TY  - INPR
A1  - Lazar, Andreea
A1  - Klein, Liane
A1  - Klon-Lipok, Johanna
A1  - Bányai, Mihály
A1  - Orbán, Gergő
A1  - Singer, Wolf
T1  - Paying attention to natural scenes in area V1
T2  - bioRxiv
N2  - Natural scene responses in the primary visual cortex are modulated simultaneously by attention and by contextual signals about scene statistics stored across the connectivity of the visual processing hierarchy. Here, we hypothesized that attentional and contextual top-down signals interact in V1, in a manner that primarily benefits the representation of natural visual stimuli, rich in high-order statistical structure. Recording from two macaques engaged in a spatial attention task, we found that attention enhanced the decodability of stimulus identity from population responses evoked by natural scenes but, critically, not by synthetic stimuli in which higher-order statistical regularities were eliminated. Population analysis revealed that neuronal responses converged to a low dimensional subspace for natural but not for synthetic images. Critically, we determined that the attentional enhancement in stimulus decodability was captured by the dominant low dimensional subspace, suggesting an alignment between the attentional and natural stimulus variance. The alignment was pronounced for late evoked responses but not for early transient responses of V1 neurons, supporting the notion that top-down feedback was required. We argue that attention and perception share top-down pathways, which mediate hierarchical interactions optimized for natural vision.
KW  - natural scenes
KW  - visual attention
KW  - primary visual cortex
KW  - neuronal populations
KW  - stimulus encoding
Y1  - 2023
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/75422
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-754222
UR  - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.21.533636v2
IS  - 2023.03.21.533636 Version 2
ER  -