Attention improves performance primarily by reducing interneuronal correlations

By Marlene R. Cohen, John H. R. Maunsell. Nature Neuroscience, 2009

1,136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Visual attention can improve behavioral performance by allowing observers to focus on the important information in a complex scene. Attention also typically increases the firing rates of cortical sensory neurons. Rate increases improve the signal-to-noise ratio of individual neurons, and this improvement has been assumed to underlie attention-related improvements in behavior. We recorded dozens of neurons simultaneously in visual area V4 and found that changes in single neurons accounted for only a small fraction of the improvement in the sensitivity of the population. Instead, over 80% of the attentional improvement in the population signal was caused by decreases in the correlations between the trial-to-trial fluctuations in the responses of pairs of neurons. These results suggest that the representation of sensory information in populations of neurons and the way attention affects the sensitivity of the population may only be understood by considering the interactions between neurons.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c5faafa73ed7f00b956a53c169eb2a26ffa5b16

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Citations in the corpus

Cortical areas interact through a communication subspace (2019, positive): “, 2018), attention (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2009), learning (Gu et al.”
Navigating the Neural Space in Search of the Neural Code. (2017, positive): “First, many behaviors depend on converging and redundant signals from large populations of similarly behaving neurons (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Froudarakis et al., 2014; Jazayeri and Movshon, 2006; Priebe and Lisberger, 2004; Rust et al., 2006; Shadlen et al., 1996; Zohary et al., 1994).”
A Feedback Model of Attention Explains the Diverse Effects of Attention on Neural Firing Rates and Receptive Field Structure (2016, background): “In particular, it cannot describe known effects of attention on firing synchrony [40] and noise decorrelation [41], or the stronger effect of attention on the late phase of neural responses.”
Odor representations in olfactory cortex: distributed rate coding and decorrelated population activity (2012, neutral): “Odor Inhalation Quenches Noise Correlations Neuronal variability and noise correlation are not static, but can be modulated by attentional state (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2009), perceptual learning (Gu et al., 2011), and stimulus input (Bhandawat et al., 2007; Churchland et al.,…”
Measuring and interpreting neuronal correlations (2011, background): “More recently, it has been shown that attentional modulation of correlations accounts for more of its effect on sensory coding than modulation of firing rat”
Different Origins of Gamma Rhythm and High-Gamma Activity in Macaque Visual Cortex (2011, background): “Several cognitive mechanisms, such as selective attention, change the degree of correlation in the neural population [57,58]; high-gamma activity potentially could be used to study these network dynamics at a fine spatial scale.”
Basal Forebrain Cholinergic Circuits and Signaling in Cognition and Cognitive Decline (2016, positive): “During the actual performance of a behavioral task, decorrelation increases the response reliability of sensory cortex neurons to the appropriate stimuli (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2009).”
Spike Synchrony Reveals Emergence of Proto-Objects in Visual Cortex (2015, result): “Attention also reduced the trial-by-trial correlation between the mean firing rates (“noise correlation”; Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2009) in consistent pairs compared with inconsistent pairs (effect of attention on Pearson’s r 0.”
Neuromodulation of brain states. (2012, neutral): “Neuron 7 that attention also causes a decrease in stimulus-independent correlated firing between neurons (Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2009), which may improve sensory encoding at the ensemble level (Zohary et al.”
Visual attention: The past 25 years (2011, positive): “Single-unit monkey physiology (Chen et al., 2008; Cohen & Maunsell, 2009; Martinez-Trujillo & Treue, 2002; McAdams & Maunsell, 1999; Mitchell, Sundberg, & Reynolds, 2009; Reynolds et al., 2000; Thiele, Pooresmaeili, Delicato, Herrero, & Roelfsema, 2009; Williford & Maunsell, 2006) and human…”