Attention can regulate the value coding of the phytokines in the cortex.

On March 13, the journal eLife published an online paper entitled "The Value Coding of Attention To Regulate the Value of Neurons in the prefrontal cortex to external objects", completed by the Yang Tianming Research Group of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology.
the study used electrophysiological records of sober macaques to find that the neurons in the macaque's altre cortex reflect the value of objects that the brain is concerning in real time.
this study explains the interrelationship between attention and value coding in the selection process.
choices are everywhere in life, such as picking oranges at fruit shops.
our process of picking oranges is often one pick, take a look, smell, decide to put it back or put it in a bag, and then pick the next one.
in the selection process, oranges with bright colors, fragrant, moderate size and other characteristics will be through our sensory system to attract our attention, let us further select them, to determine their "stay."
interesting is that while different sensory information can be processed in parallel by the brain, our decision-making process can often only be carried out in turn, which is a serial process.
attention to the role played in the transformation from parallel to serial in the cognitive process of choice, etc., is still very little known. Yang Tianming's research team,
, studied this problem by studying the coding of value information in the frontal lobe of the brain.
the prefrontal cortex is a sub-region of the prefrontal lobe of the brain's advanced cognitive center, named for its position above the eye socket.
previous studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex is a key part of the brain's reward loop.
it accepts and integrates the input of multiple sensory information such as vision, taste, smell, and can encode the value of the object, which plays a key role in the value evaluation of the selection process.
this new study further explores whether the foerfront is more serialor-led or parallel in the process of decision-making cognition, and how attention regulates the value information coding of this brain region.
attention, rewards, and choices are highly correlated under normal circumstances.
to distinguish between the effects of these factors on neurons' coding, the researchers designed a sophisticated experiment.
In this experiment, macaques only need to look at a monitor to look at pictures that represent different sizes of juice rewards.
If there is only one picture on the screen, the macaque can be rewarded without making any choices.
if two pictures appear on the screen at the same time, one of them is randomly selected by the computer as the ultimate reward, and the macaque still doesn't have to make any choices.
also, in some tests, one of the two images would attract the monkey's attention by turning quickly, but the rotation did not change the size of the reward, nor did it have anything to do with the randomly selected reward picture, which did not make any sense to the macaque.
macaques can't help but turn their attention to the picture just because it suddenly rotates.
through this experimental design, attention, reward, and choice are separated.
when the macaques look at two pictures, and while the final reward may be any of them, the researchers measured the macaque's pupil response and found that the macaque's attention was always focused on the larger picture.
at the same time, the frontal lobe neurons were also highly consistent with attention, encoding only the value of the larger picture, while ignoring another image.
However, if the researchers use one of the images to attract the monkey's attention in the process of presenting the picture, the neurons in the frontal lobe follow the attention to encode the value of the rotated picture, even if the picture represents a smaller reward.
the researchers found that almost every coded value of the frontal lobe neurons exhibitthis this property with few exceptions.
using a computational model, the researchers further explained that the likelihood of attention being switched by the rotation of the picture was related to the value of the two pictures.
if the picture in which the macaque's original attention represents a great reward, it is less likely that the attention will switch to another picture.
it's like we're not bothered when we're reading a very interesting book.
If the books we read are boring and boring, a little movement from the outside world will grab our attention.
: (A) When the macaques look at two pictures at the same time, the macaque's attention is focused on the images associated with the larger rewards, and the electrical activity of neurons in the phrase cortex only encodes the value of the larger graphics.
(B) The electrical activity of the frontal lobe neurons is directed by attention as they turn the picture to attract the attention of the macaque, encoding the value of the rotated image.
(C) calculation model explains the correlation between attention switching and picture value.
dashed line in the graph is the change in neuronal release caused by attention conversion as the graph rotates.
the green dotted line is the prediction of the calculated model and the red dashed line is the actual data.
see Xie, Nie, and Yang, 2018. The results of the study show that, unlike the visual properties of the brain's visual cortex, which encodes multiple objects in parallel, the prefrontal neurons encode only the value of the object in which attention is located.
therefore, the brain's processing of value information in the frontal cortex has been transformed into a serial process.
Because neuroscientists generally believe that the value information encoded by the prefrontal lobe is used by the prefrontal prefrontal region for value judgment and choice, this study is likely to mean that the brain's value-making process is a serial process.
the frontal lobe is also different from the lower level of the sensory cortex, located at a higher level of brain information processing, where neuronal activity reflects our decision-making and cognitive processes.
the study was conducted under the guidance of researcher Yang Tianming, and was completed by PhD students Xie Yang and Yan Qi.
the project was supported by the 100-person program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the scientific research project of the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission (15JC1400104).
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