Study type: In vivo/preclinical · Status: Evidence verified by machine against declared source
Reward history guides focal attention in whisker somatosensory cortex.
Nature communications · 2025
Study scale: Attentional boosting in L2/3 pyramidal cells is topographically precise and whisker-specific, and shifts receptive fields toward the attended whisker.
Abstract only: Open source record
Product or molecular entity relationships
- VIP: Exact entity relationship. Legacy citation custody associates this source with the catalog record; no product-relevance conclusion is implied.
Public plain-language summary
Some fields are not published, because the text held for them did not answer their heading. The published text is limited to the declared source and preserves reported uncertainty. It does not establish efficacy, safety, suitability, or evidence strength.
Research question
Mice provide powerful cell-type-specific tools to identify precise neural circuit mechanisms underlying attentional processing.
Study design
Stage 7 represented the final whisker detection task, which included completely randomized Go/NoGo trials, a fixed trial abort window and reward plateau parameters, and eliminating the blue light that signaled reward delivery.
Participants or experimental system
In a whisker touch detection task, we show that mice flexibly shift attention between specific whiskers on a trial-by-trial timescale, guided by the recent history of stimulus-reward association.
Study scale
Attentional boosting in L2/3 pyramidal cells is topographically precise and whisker-specific, and shifts receptive fields toward the attended whisker.
Intervention or exposure
Boosting also failed to occur if the mouse licked to the prior Go but received no reward (i.e., unrewarded hits) or a very small reward (< 4% of maximal reward volume (d’>1HitSame vs d’>1HitDiff, p = 0.49, permutation test) (Fig. 1F).
Comparator
However, the fine-scale organization of attentional boosting in sensory cortex and the neural circuits that control it remain unclear.
Outcomes examined
The neurobiology of attention has been studied extensively in non-human primates1,18, and has been shown to involve boosting of signal-to-noise ratio for neural encoding of attended sensory features across the cortical sensory hierarchy, including primary sensory cortex.
Key findings
Not published. The text held for this field did not answer this heading, so nothing is shown here and nothing is substituted for it.
Limitations and uncertainty
Not published. The text held for this field did not answer this heading, so nothing is shown here and nothing is substituted for it.
Product relevance and evidence boundary
This record is a published study, held here with its citation and review status. It is not a statement that any catalog item is effective, safe, or suitable for any use, and nothing in it is a dose or a protocol.
Evidence verified by machine against declared source. Verification is limited to the declared source and review scope. It does not mean independent replication or establish efficacy, safety, or suitability.