Study type: In vivo/preclinical · Status: Verified against declared source

Reward history guides focal attention in whisker somatosensory cortex.

Nature communications · 2025

Study scale: A Whisker detection task in head-fixed mice.

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.

Plain-language verified summary

Question

The neural mechanisms and control circuits for attention remain poorly understood, and likely differ between different forms of attention.

Methods

A Mean whisker motion, platform motion (proxy for body motion), and pupil size traces, from DeepLabCut analysis across 43,647 trials, 74 sessions in 9 mice.

Scale or participants

A Whisker detection task in head-fixed mice.

Key findings

Prior reward is a potent cue for attentional capture, but the underlying neurobiology is largely unknown.

Limitations and uncertainty

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.

Verified 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.