Researchers have uncovered the cellular mechanisms behind human brain's ability to pay attention to relevant information while ignoring distractions.
Despite much study of attention in the brain, the cellular mechanisms responsible for the effects of attention have remained a mystery until now, researchers said.
Researchers from Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and the University of California Davis studied communications between synaptically connected neurons under conditions where subjects shifted their attention toward or away from visual stimuli that activated the recorded neurons.
More From This Section
The results point to a novel mechanism by which attention shapes perception by selectively altering presynaptic weights to highlight sensory features among all the noisy sensory input.
"While our findings are consistent with other reported changes in neuronal firing rates with attention, they go far beyond such descriptions, revealing never-before tested mechanisms at the synaptic level," said study co-author Farran Briggs, assistant professor of Physiology and Neurobiology at the Geisel School of Medicine.
In addition to expanding our understanding of brain, this study could help people with attention deficits resulting from brain injury or disease, possibly leading to improved screening and new treatments, researchers said.
The study was published in the journal Nature.