The physiology of attention: participation of cat striate cortex in behavioral choice

In the awake, behaving cat, we have compared response of striate cortex neurons to informative and to noninformative stimuli. A cat pressed a pedal in response to a flashed pattern repeated every 10 s, receiving a reward if the press was within a 0.5-1.5-s post-stimulus window. There were three trial types: 50% of the trials had only the initial informative flash, 25% had an additional physically identical, but unrewarded, flash 500 ms after the first, and 25% had an unrewarded flash 3-5 s after the informative flash. Cats learned to respond only to the rewarded flashes. Neurons were divided into two categories: 27 neurons defined as "primary" showed an early burst of firing 30-70 ms after stimulus onset, and 17 did not. The distinction was arbitrary, since all cells were exposed to the same stimulus. For stimuli preceding a pedal press, stimulus-synchronized histograms of primary neurons had a smaller early burst and more firing before and after it. Response-synchronized histograms showed an abrupt decrease in firing shortly before the pedal press. The effects were stronger for primary cells in the stimulus-synchronized data and stronger for non-primary cells in the response-synchronized data.