Frontiers in Decision  Neuroscience.

2011, 5:13. FULL TEXT

Reward sharpens orientation coding independently of attention

Stefano Baldassi¹* and Claudio Simoncini²

• ¹ Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
• ² Team DyVA – Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France

It has long been known that rewarding improves performance. However it is unclear whether this is due to high level modulations in the output modules of associated neural systems or due to low level mechanisms favoring more “generous” inputs? Some recent studies suggest that primary sensory areas, including V1 and A1, may form part of the circuitry of reward-based modulations, but there is no data indicating whether reward can be dissociated from attention or cross-trial forms of perceptual learning. Here we address this issue with a psychophysical dual task, to control attention, while perceptual performance on oriented targets associated with different levels of reward is assessed by measuring both orientation discrimination thresholds and behavioral tuning functions for tilt values near threshold. We found that reward, at any rate, improved performance. However, higher reward rates showed an improvement of orientation discrimination thresholds by about 50% across conditions and sharpened behavioral tuning functions. Data were unaffected by changing the attentional load and by dissociating the feature of the reward cue from the task-relevant feature. These results suggest that reward may act within the span of a single trial independently of attention by modulating the activity of early sensory stages through a improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio of task-relevant channels.

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"Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu”
—    
San Tommaso d’Aquino

I sensi sono il veicolo della nostra conoscenza. La crescita e l’apprendimento, le emozioni, la comunicazione e le relazioni, ma anche le abilità motorie e l’attenzione passano attraverso la mediazione che i nostri sistemi sensoriali operano sul mondo esterno. La lettura, la capacità di cogliere espressioni facciali, il gusto tratto da una pietanza, il godimento fornito dalla musica e l’abilità di calciare una palla al volo sono una piccolissima frazione dei ‘poteri’ che i nostri sensi ci attribuiscono. Il cervello, e la sua parte più evoluta, la corteccia cerebrale, riconoscono questa priorità dei sistemi cognitivi umani dedicando ai sensi circa il 50% delle risorse neurali. La percezione è l’interfaccia tra la chimica e la fisica del mondo esterno e la nostra mente, e si basa su meccanismi affascinanti e spesso poco noti, tutti coordinati dal cervello. I bimbi di Latignano ne hanno conosciuti alcuni e sono felici di spiegarli agli adulti. La biologia dei sensi, la psicologia della percezione, la fisica ottica ed acustica, la chimica necessaria a capire gusto ed olfatto in una mostra-laboratorio interattiva dove i protagonisti saranno gli stessi bimbi.
La mostra è curata da Francesca Pei, docente di Percezione alla New York University e vice-presidente dell’AISV e da Stefano Baldassi, ricercatore e docente presso l’Università di Firenze e la NewYork University e presidente dell’AISV, in collaborazione con le maestre Vania Paolicchi e Marta...

I have just released the new version of Percezione.org. The use of novel dynamic web technologies, thanks to the open source project Joomla,will allow me to expand this site and make it a portal for human perception, from the university courses I teach to more accessible forms of promulgation of the perceptual sciences. A special section on one of my hobbies, well related to percpetual science, will be on photography, with selected links and a selecion of shots I have taken over the last 10 years.  Registered users will enjoy most of the contents.
It's a newborn site. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!

PS Most of the content is in both Italian and English. When only in italian it is likely that is a part that would not be of interest to international visitors of the site.