TY - JOUR T1 - A Normalization Circuit Underlying Coding of Spatial Attention in Primate Lateral Prefrontal Cortex JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0301-18.2019 VL - 6 IS - 2 SP - ENEURO.0301-18.2019 AU - Lyndon Duong AU - Matthew Leavitt AU - Florian Pieper AU - Adam Sachs AU - Julio Martinez-Trujillo Y1 - 2019/03/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0301-18.2019.abstract N2 - Lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) neurons signal the allocation of voluntary attention; however, the neural computations underlying this function remain unknown. To investigate this, we recorded from neuronal ensembles in the LPFC of two Macaca fascicularis performing a visuospatial attention task. LPFC neural responses to a single stimulus were normalized when additional stimuli/distracters appeared across the visual field and were well-characterized by an averaging computation. Deploying attention toward an individual stimulus surrounded by distracters shifted neural activity from an averaging regime toward a regime similar to that when the attended stimulus was presented in isolation (winner-take-all; WTA). However, attentional modulation is both qualitatively and quantitatively dependent on a neuron’s visuospatial tuning. Our results show that during attentive vision, LPFC neuronal ensemble activity can be robustly read out by downstream areas to generate motor commands, and/or fed back into sensory areas to filter out distracter signals in favor of target signals. ER -