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A unified selection signal for attention and reward in primary visual cortex

  1. Pieter R. Roelfsemaa,c,d,1
  1. aDepartment of Vision and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1105 BA Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
  2. bSwammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, 1098 SM Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
  3. cDepartment of Integrative Neurophysiology, Centre for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research, Vrije Universiteit, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and
  4. dPsychiatry Department, Academic Medical Center, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  1. Edited by Thomas D. Albright, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved April 18, 2013 (received for review January 3, 2013)

Abstract

Stimuli associated with high rewards evoke stronger neuronal activity than stimuli associated with lower rewards in many brain regions. It is not well understood how these reward effects influence activity in sensory cortices that represent low-level stimulus features. Here, we investigated the effects of reward information in the primary visual cortex (area V1) of monkeys. We found that the reward value of a stimulus relative to the value of other stimuli is a good predictor of V1 activity. Relative value biases the competition between stimuli, just as has been shown for selective attention. The neuronal latency of this reward value effect in V1 was similar to the latency of attentional influences. Moreover, V1 neurons with a strong value effect also exhibited a strong attention effect, which implies that relative value and top–down attention engage overlapping, if not identical, neuronal selection mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that the effects of reward value reach down to the earliest sensory processing levels of the cerebral cortex and imply that theories about the effects of reward coding and top–down attention on visual representations should be unified.

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: p.roelfsema{at}nin.knaw.nl.

  • Author contributions: L.S., C.M.A.P., and P.R.R. designed research; L.S. performed research; L.S., C.v.d.T., and P.R.R. analyzed data; and L.S. and P.R.R. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1300117110/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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