The physiology of attention: participation of cat striate cortex in behavioral choice

Summary In the awake, behaving cat, we have compared response of striate cortex neurons to informative and to noninformative stimuli. A cat pressed a pedal in response to a flashed pattern repeated every 10 s, receiving a reward if the press was within a 0.5–1.5-s post-stimulus window. There were three trial types: 50% of the trials had only the initial informative flash, 25% had an additional physically identical, but unrewarded, flash 500 ms after the first, and 25% had an unrewarded flash 3–5 s after the informative flash. Cats learned to respond only to the rewarded flashes. Neurons were divided into two categories: 27 neurons defined as primary showed an early burst of firing 30–70 ms after stimulus onset, and 17 did not. The distinction was arbitrary, since all cells were exposed to the same stimulus. For stimuli preceding a pedal press, stimulus-synchronized histograms of primary neurons had a smaller early burst and more firing before and after it. Response-synchronized histograms showed an abrupt decrease in firing shortly before the pedal press. The effects were stronger for primary cells in the stimulus-synchronized data and stronger for non-primary cells in the response-synchronized data.