Mechanisms of attentional gating of sensory evidence during decision-making (360G-Wellcome-224121_Z_21_Z)

Quick and effective decision-making in a rich sensory world requires animals to use prior knowledge and internal goals to prioritise relevant sensory evidence to guide their actions. Spatial attention is the cognitive ability to constrain the processing of sensory evidence to particular spatial locations while ignoring presumed irrelevant sensory evidence from other locations. The mechanisms by which spatial attention is realized in neural circuits are poorly understood. I will use a combination of Neuropixels recordings, circuit tools, and computational analyses and modelling in a novel attentional change detection task wherein mice continuously track attended content without responding. This will allow neural investigation of attentional mechanisms and attended sensory content in the absence of motor confounds. Firstly, I aim to determine how neural representations of sensory evidence are modulated by spatial attention in brain areas representing task-relevant sensory evidence. Secondly, I aim to understand how interactions between brain areas causally shape attended task-relevant sensory representations and dynamics. The outcome of this work is a better understanding of how attentional processes mechanistically influence task-relevant sensory processing at a single-cell, neural population, and circuits levels. This will help us develop a model of how internal cognitive processes integrate with the external sensory world.