Reward sharpens orientation coding independently on attention
Correspondence: (Login to view email address)
- Department of Psychology, University of Florence
- DyVA Team, Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée (CNRS)
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- Document Type:
- Manuscript
- Date:
- Received 03 April 2009 10:24 UTC; Posted 03 April 2009
- Subjects:
- Neuroscience
- Abstract:
Rewarding improves performance. Is it due to modulations of the output modules of the neural systems or are there mechanisms favoring more ‘generous’ inputs? Some recent study included V1 in the the circuitry of reward-based modulations, but the effects of reward can easily be confused with effects of attention. Here we address this issue with a psychophysical dual task to control attention while orientation sensitivity on targets associated to different levels of reward is measured. We found that different reward rates improve orientation discrimination and sharpen the internal response distributions. Data are unaffected by changing attentional load nor by dissociating the feature of the reward cue from the feature relevant for the task. This suggests that reward may act independently on attention by modulating the activity of early sensory stages, perhaps V1, through a SNR improvement of task-relevant channels. Reward acts like attention, but using separate channels.
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- License:
- This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
- How to cite this document:
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Baldassi, Stefano and Simoncini, Claudio. Reward sharpens orientation coding independently on attention. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.3023.1> (2009)
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