DYNAMICS OF NATURALISTIC ATTENTION ACROSS SPECIES

In an ever-changing environment, flexible control of behaviour is crucial for survival. Across species, adaptive processes like attention and motivation manifest as flexibly fluctuating, brain-wide states. Although these states likely share commonalities across species, classical tasks are highly species-specific, preventing direct cross-species comparisons.

Here we examine naturalistic fluctuations of attention across three species—mice, monkeys, and humans—completing the same highly immersive virtual reality (VR) foraging task. This allows us to continuously track behavioural decision making as subjects navigate a complex, naturalistic visuomotor challenge that requires minimal training. We trained Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) on the same behavioural readouts across all three species to identify behavioural states that occupy distinct regions of the speed–accuracy space.

The temporal structure of behavioural states was broadly conserved across species, with state occupancy unfolding on a comparable timescale. Behaviour also showed a slow, shared fluctuation in performance speed that was not explained by task difficulty, consistent with largely internally generated dynamics. In parallel, visual-cortical population activity in macaques and mice was systematically modulated by behavioural state, revealing neural signatures that track these shared dynamics.

These observations confirm that in a naturalistic context which allows us to quantify behaviour in a way that can be applied across species, we can identify global cognitive states that are shared and conserved across the taxa.