Kuwook Cha

Abstract Every moment, a spotlight of attention roams our visual field to enhance detection of salient stimuli. While recent work suggests how the brain selects salient relevant stimuli (attentional focus), it is unknown if there are mechanisms that modulate attention to suit fluctuating target salience or internal needs (attentional strength).

Abstract Visual attention enhances the neural representation of salient stimuli within the visual cortex. It is generally thought that this enhancement is driven by glutamatergic feedback from frontal cortical areas. Here we report the unexpected observation that dorsal raphe (DR) derived serotonin (5HT) controls visual attention. We developed a behavioral model that captured the way mice allocated attention to cued and uncued visual locations and features.

Visual attention allows the brain to evoke behaviors based on the most important visual features. Mouse models offer immense potential to gain a circuit-level understanding of this phenomenon, yet how mice distribute attention across features and locations is not well understood. Here, we describe a new approach to address this limitation by training mice to detect weak vertical bars in a background of dynamic noise while spatial cues manipulate their attention.