Abstract
Habituation of the orienting response has long served as a model system for studying fundamental psychological phenomena such as learning, attention, decisions, and surprise. In this article, we review an emerging hypothesis that the evolutionary role of the superior colliculus (SC) in mammals or its homolog in birds, the optic tectum (OT), is to select the most salient target and send this information to the appropriate brain regions to control the body and brain orienting responses. Recent studies have begun to reveal mechanisms of how saliency is computed in the OT/SC, demonstrating a striking similarity between mammals and birds. The saliency of a target can be determined by how different it is from the surrounding objects, by how different it is from its history (that is habituation) and by how relevant it is for the task at hand. Here, we will first review evidence, mostly from primates and barn owls, that all three types of saliency computations are linked in the OT/SC. We will then focus more on neural adaptation in the OT and its possible link to temporal saliency and habituation.
Highlights
HABITUATION AND SALIENCY MAPPING An animal can respond to only one stimulus source at a time, even though its sensory systems are bombarded by information arriving from multiple sources
How can an animal decide if a stimulus is behaviorally relevant? What are the sensory cues and to what extent are they general across species? A dog among cats, a brown object among orange objects, or a pure tone succeeding a long period of broadband noise are all conspicuous stimuli
Note that the event of the door knob turning is not louder than the background noise. This example demonstrates a major aspect of saliency mapping; that the saliency of a stimulus is not determined by its physical strength but by its relationship with the environment, or, in other words, by its context
Summary
Habituation of the orienting response has long served as a model system for studying fundamental psychological phenomena such as learning, attention, decisions, and surprise. We review an emerging hypothesis that the evolutionary role of the superior colliculus (SC) in mammals or its homolog in birds, the optic tectum (OT), is to select the most salient target and send this information to the appropriate brain regions to control the body and brain orienting responses. Recent studies have begun to reveal mechanisms of how saliency is computed in the OT/SC, demonstrating a striking similarity between mammals and birds. We will first review evidence, mostly from primates and barn owls, that all three types of saliency computations are linked in the OT/SC. We will focus more on neural adaptation in the OT and its possible link to temporal saliency and habituation
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