Paying Attention through Eye Movements: A Computational Investigation of the Premotor Theory of Spatial Attention

摘要

Growing evidence indicates that planning eye movementsnand orienting visuospatial attention share overlapping brainnmechanisms. A tight link between endogenous attention andneye movements is maintained by the premotor theory, in contrastnto other accounts that postulate the existence of specificnattention mechanisms that modulate the activity of informationnprocessing systems. The strong assumption of equivalence betweennattention and eye movements, however, is challenged byndemonstrations that human observers are able to keep attentionnon a specific location while moving the eyes elsewhere.nHere we investigate whether a recurrent model of saccadicnplanning can account for attentional effects without requiringnadditional or specific mechanisms separate from the circuitsnthat perform sensorimotor transformations for eye movements.nThe model builds on the basis function approach and includesna circuit that performs spatial remapping using an “internalnforward model” of how visual inputs are modified as a resultnof saccadic movements. Simulations show that the latter circuitnis crucial to account for dissociations between attention and eyenmovements that may be invoked to disprove the premotorntheory. The model provides new insights into how spatial remappingnmay be implemented in parietal cortex and offers ancomputational framework for recent proposals that link visualnstability with remapping of attention pointers