Topic: perceptual sensitivity

There remains significant debate about the role of cortical inhibition for visual selectivity and perception [1,2]. A long-standing view states feedforward excitation dictates neural selectivity for visual features, while cortical inhibition reacts with unselective feedback simply to regulate activity levels. Yet much work shows that cortical inhibition drives distinct computational transformations of visual selectivity in excitatory neurons [3-7]. It has yet to be shown if these effects of inhibition on neural selectivity also drive equivalent transformations of visual perceptual sensitivity.

Perceptual sensitivity varies from moment-to-moment with fluctuations in the gain of sensory-evoked responses. We previously found that intrinsic traveling waves (iTWs) of activity in marmoset Area MT regulate the gain of evoked responses for targets presented near perceptual threshold and correlate with the monkey’s detection performance (Davis, Muller, et al. Nature 2020; Davis, Benigno, et al. Nat. Communi. 2021). Here we ask whether target detection also depends on the spiking activity of neurons beyond the retinotopic locus of the target (off-target locations). We hypothesized that activi

The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has led to concerns about their impact on our attention span and ability to focus. Despite these concerns, relatively few studies have attempted to address whether smartphone usage is negatively associated with our ability to sustain attention. The current study aimed to establish whether higher smartphone usage is linked to impaired performance on a demanding sustained attention task where participants were required to continuously monitor a checkerboard stimulus for intermittent changes in stimulus contrast. Sixty-nine participants completed th