Back

Sharing the Spotlight: Uncovering common attentional dynamics across species

Glukhova, M.; Tlaie, A.; Muresan, R.; Taylor, R.; Ferracci, P.-A.; Shapcott, K.; Arne, O.; Ciuparu, A.; Havenith, M. N.; Schölvinck, M. L.

2024-11-01 animal behavior and cognition
10.1101/2024.11.01.621490 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Sustained attention is a key underlying process to many natural behaviours that are shared by multiple species. Yet the way it is commonly studied in a lab context precludes any meaningful cross-species comparisons. Here, we engaged mice, monkeys, and humans in the exact same, natural perceptual decision task in a VR environment. We captured their behaviour into several parameters along the speed/accuracy axes along which sustained attention is classically defined, and used HMMs to infer four attentional states. We show that the dynamics of these states, both in terms of their durations as well as the transitions between them, are much more similar between the species than might have been expected. Moreover, attentional state fluctuations seem to be internally generated. The task and analyses developed here represent a new approach to compare sustained attention across species in an objective, data-driven way.

Published in PLOS Computational Biology (predicted rank #7) · training set

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 5%
14.9%
Similar papers in this journal
2
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 2%
14.8%
Similar papers in this journal
3
iScience
○ 1154 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
12.4%
Similar papers in this journal
4
PLOS Biology
● 486 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
8.7%
Similar papers in this journal
50% of probability mass above
5
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 393 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
7.7%
Similar papers in this journal
6
Current Biology
○ 665 papers in training set
Top 2%
7.1%
PLOS Computational Biology · published here
● 1863 papers in training set
Top 7%
5.4%
8
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 20%
4.7%
9
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 31%
4.3%
10
Science Advances
● 1243 papers in training set
Top 11%
3.2%
11
Communications Biology
○ 993 papers in training set
Top 9%
2.3%
12
Nature Human Behaviour
○ 95 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.7%
13
Nature Neuroscience
○ 252 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.5%
14
BMC Biology
○ 265 papers in training set
Top 4%
1.0%
15
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 57%
1.0%
16
The Journal of Neuroscience
● 1025 papers in training set
Top 9%
1.0%
17
Neuron
○ 337 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.8%
18
Science
● 477 papers in training set
Top 9%
0.8%
19
eneuro
● 439 papers in training set
Top 8%
0.8%
20
Animal Cognition
○ 23 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
0.6%
21
Cell Reports
○ 1498 papers in training set
Top 30%
0.6%

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.