Abstract
Human neuroimaging has revealed brain networks involving frontal and parietal cortical areas as well as subcortical areas, including the superior colliculus and pulvinar, which are involved in orienting to sensory stimuli. Because accumulating evidence points to similarities between both overt and covert orienting in humans and other animals, we propose that it is now feasible, using animal models, to move beyond these large-scale networks to address the local networks and cell types that mediate orienting of attention. In this opinion piece, we discuss optogenetic and related methods for testing the pathways involved, and obstacles to carrying out such tests in rodent and monkey populations.
Highlights
Orienting toward a stimulus or location has been an important model for the study of attention and has been used as a common task to compare humans, monkeys, and rodents
The source of the orienting effect is a brain network described which serves to amplify information coming from sites in the visual, auditory, or somatosensory cortex
A model task, using visual cues, is appropriate for both humans and non-human animals, to study simple orienting in an empty visual field [2]. This task used cues occurring at the location of a likely target and those presented at fixation that provide a basis for a voluntary movement of attention to the target location
Summary
Orienting toward a stimulus or location has been an important model for the study of attention and has been used as a common task to compare humans, monkeys, and rodents. A model task, using visual cues, is appropriate for both humans and non-human animals, to study simple orienting in an empty visual field [2]. This task used cues occurring at the location of a likely target (exogenous cuing) and those presented at fixation that provide a basis for a voluntary movement of attention to the target location (endogenous cuing). This task, designed to study covert orienting, has the following properties: (1) It presents a cue to direct attention to a target location; (2) it monitors eye movements to eliminate overt shifts; (3) it uses a single detection response to avoid differential muscular preparation; and (4) it measures reaction time to respond to the target to assay improvements due to the cue
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