TY - JOUR
T1 - Attention Stabilizes Representations in the Human Hippocampus
AU - Aly, Mariam
AU - Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01-EY021755 to N.B.T.-B.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 The Author 2015.
PY - 2016/2/1
Y1 - 2016/2/1
N2 - Attention and memory are intricately linked, but how attention modulates brain areas that subserve memory, such as the hippocampus, is unknown. We hypothesized that attention may stabilize patterns of activity in human hippocampus, resulting in distinct but reliable activity patterns for different attentional states. To test this prediction, we utilized high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging and a novel "art gallery" task. On each trial, participants viewed a room containing a painting, and searched a stream of rooms for a painting from the same artist (art state) or a room with the same layout (room state). Bottom-up stimulation was the same in both tasks, enabling the isolation of neural effects related to top-down attention. Multivariate analyses revealed greater pattern similarity in all hippocampal subfields for trials from the same, compared with different, attentional state. This stability was greater for the room than art state, was unrelated to univariate activity, and, in CA2/CA3/DG, was correlated with behavior. Attention therefore induces representational stability in the human hippocampus, resulting in distinct activity patterns for different attentional states. Modulation of hippocampal representational stability highlights the far-reaching influence of attention outside of sensory systems.
AB - Attention and memory are intricately linked, but how attention modulates brain areas that subserve memory, such as the hippocampus, is unknown. We hypothesized that attention may stabilize patterns of activity in human hippocampus, resulting in distinct but reliable activity patterns for different attentional states. To test this prediction, we utilized high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging and a novel "art gallery" task. On each trial, participants viewed a room containing a painting, and searched a stream of rooms for a painting from the same artist (art state) or a room with the same layout (room state). Bottom-up stimulation was the same in both tasks, enabling the isolation of neural effects related to top-down attention. Multivariate analyses revealed greater pattern similarity in all hippocampal subfields for trials from the same, compared with different, attentional state. This stability was greater for the room than art state, was unrelated to univariate activity, and, in CA2/CA3/DG, was correlated with behavior. Attention therefore induces representational stability in the human hippocampus, resulting in distinct activity patterns for different attentional states. Modulation of hippocampal representational stability highlights the far-reaching influence of attention outside of sensory systems.
KW - Attentional modulation
KW - High-resolution fMRI
KW - Hippocampal subfields
KW - Medial temporal lobe
KW - Task representations
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U2 - 10.1093/cercor/bhv041
DO - 10.1093/cercor/bhv041
M3 - Article
C2 - 25766839
AN - SCOPUS:84960411867
SN - 1047-3211
VL - 26
SP - 783
EP - 796
JO - Cerebral Cortex
JF - Cerebral Cortex
IS - 2
ER -