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. We hypothesize 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 show that attention enhances 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. Attentional enhancement of stimulus decodability from population responses occurs in low dimensional spaces, as revealed by principal component analysis, suggesting an alignment between the attentional and the natural stimulus variance. Moreover, natural scenes produce stimulus-specific oscillatory responses in V1, whose power undergoes a global shift from low to high frequencies with attention. 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/73401
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-734017
UR  - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.21.533636v1
IS  - 2023.03.21.533636 Version 1
ER  -