PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lyndon Duong
AU  - Matthew Leavitt
AU  - Florian Pieper
AU  - Adam Sachs
AU  - Julio Martinez-Trujillo
TI  - A Normalization Circuit Underlying Coding of Spatial Attention in Primate Lateral Prefrontal Cortex
AID  - 10.1523/ENEURO.0301-18.2019
DP  - 2019 Mar 01
TA  - eneuro
PG  - ENEURO.0301-18.2019
VI  - 6
IP  - 2
4099  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0301-18.2019.short
4100  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0301-18.2019.full
SO  - eNeuro2019 Mar 01; 6
AB  - 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.