Schedule of Events | Symposia

Exploring the role of selective attention in decision rule representation

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 2 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Independence Ballroom.

Liam P. McMahon¹, Jared Newell¹, Lauren Wolters¹, James D. Howard¹; ¹Brandeis University

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to selectively attend to relevant information in complex environments and use this information to guide optimal decisions. Animal studies suggest that the mediodorsal thalamus (MDT) is a critical region for facilitating attention-guided rule representation in prefrontal cortex. Human neuroimaging studies point to a role for connectivity between MDT and both olfactory sensory cortex and prefrontal cortex in selective attention to odor stimuli. However, the relationship between attention-modulated MDT connectivity and neural representation of task rules in prefrontal cortex has not been established in humans. Here we aim to shed light on this process using an attention-guided two-alternative forced choice task. On each trial, participants are first cued to attend to either olfactory or auditory information, and then are simultaneously delivered one of two distinct odors and one of two distinct tones. The identity of the attended stimulus determines which of two subsequently presented choice options leads to a monetary reward. Behavioral results indicate that participants are able to make correct choices throughout the task and selectively attend to the cued stimulus. We aim to explore the mechanisms underlying this process by having participants perform this task while undergoing high-field fMRI scanning. We plan to implement a combination of multivariate pattern analysis techniques and functional connectivity analyses to test the hypothesis that coupling between MDT and prefrontal cortex facilitates representation of decision rules in distributed patterns of prefrontal cortex activity. Findings from this study may reveal a novel role for MDT in selective attention in humans.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory