Penn Medicine Neuroscientists Identify Brain Mechanism that Drives Focus Despite Distractions
In a new study published in Neuron, neuroscientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania sought to illuminate the neural mechanism that helps the brain decide whether to focus visual attention on a rewarding task or an alluring distraction. By analyzing neuron activity in animal models as they faced this kind of attentional conflict, the researchers discovered that a pattern of coordinated activity called “beta bursts” in a set of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC)—a section in the front of the brain responsible for motivation and rewards—appears to have a major role in keeping attention task-focused, essentially by suppressing the influence of the distracting stimulus.
“Our research suggests that while all brains have the ability to focus on a rewarding task and filter out distractions, some are better at it than others,” senior author Bijan Pesaran PhD, the Robert A Groff II Professor of Neurosurgery at Penn Medicine, said in a university news release. “By understanding how our brains process rewarding stimuli, we hope to be able to also understand failures to do so in a variety of cognitive and psychiatric disorders, including attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
In the new study, the researchers sought to understand what directs attention to some stimuli, but suppresses others in more detail. Using animal models, researchers recorded how activity in the LPFC shifts while completing a task while being presented with visual distractions. The neuroscientists found strong evidence that one specific type of LPFC neurons, called visual-movement neurons, direct attention towards either the rewarding shape or the distracting one.