Task-specific employment of sensory signals underlies rapid task switching.

Abstract

Much of our flexible behavior is dependent on responding efficiently to relevant information while discarding irrelevant information. Little is known, however, about how neural pathways governing sensory-motor associations can rapidly switch to accomplish such flexibility. Here, we addressed this question by electrically microstimulating middle temporal (MT) neurons selective for both motion direction and binocular disparity in monkeys switching between direction and depth discrimination tasks. Surprisingly, we frequently found that the observed psychophysical bias precipitated by delivering microstimulation to neurons whose preferred direction and depth were related to opposite choices in the two tasks was substantially shifted toward a specific movement. Furthermore, these effects correlated with behavioral switching performance. Our findings suggest that the outputs of sensory signals are task specific and that irrelevant sensory-motor pathways are gated depending on task demand so as to accomplish rapid attentional switching.