Attention in Animals: What We Learned
A look at how attention works in different animal species.
― 7 min read
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When you think of animals and their smarts, you might picture a clever dog or a mischievous monkey. But did you know that Attention is a big deal in the animal kingdom, too? It helps mammals like mice, monkeys, and humans find food, avoid danger, and interact with each other. This article dives into how we studied attention in these different Species and what we found out.
The Importance of Attention
Attention is like that extra shot of espresso that helps you focus when you're studying or working. Without it, mice might become easy snacks for birds, monkeys might miss their next meal, and humans? Well, they might struggle with reading the fine print on a cereal box. So, paying attention is pretty crucial.
In a neuroscience lab, sustained attention means staying focused on a specific task. When animals are highly attentive, it often shows through things like bigger pupils or increased movement. But here's the catch: it's hard to stay focused for too long. Just like zoning out during a boring lecture, attention can fluctuate. This means sometimes animals are on point, and other times, not so much.
Performance
Attention andWhen animals or humans concentrate on a task, they usually perform better. They tend to respond faster and make fewer mistakes. However, there’s a game going on in their brains called the speed-accuracy trade-off. Sometimes they focus on being quick, other times on being correct. There’s also a chance that rewards-like tasty treats-can influence their attention strategies.
It seems pretty clear that sustained attention is important for many species, but here's the kicker: how do we compare attention levels across different animals? Humans, mice, and monkeys tend to engage in different Tasks, so comparing their attention can be like comparing apples to oranges.
Different Tasks, Different Animals
Take a mouse, for instance. In experiments, they often do tasks that involve physically moving around a chamber or running on a treadmill to reach rewards. Scientists watch their behavior and guess their attention based on things like movement and licking for rewards.
Monkeys, on the other hand, usually work on visual tasks where they sit still and make small movements. Researchers have found that when monkeys are highly attentive, they get better at spotting subtle changes in what they see. But in this context, their attention level can vary a lot from trial to trial, sometimes leading to them completely zoning out.
And then we have humans. In psychology labs, they often face monotonous tasks where they must maintain focus in order to respond correctly to targets. It can get dull, and as a result, lapses in attention become common.
A Natural Approach
To truly understand attention, we decided to bring all three species into the same experimental setting. We created a virtual reality (VR) environment that resembled a natural setting. Instead of pressing buttons, animals and humans could ‘walk’ towards objects that looked like leaves. They moved about freely, which helped capture their behavior in a more natural way.
This new setup allowed us to scrutinize their performance beyond the usual reaction times and success rates. For example, if a mouse took a long time to respond, it might mean it was deeply focused but unsure about the answer or perhaps just distracted.
The Experiment Setup
We set up a simple task where participants had to choose between two leaf-shaped objects in the VR world, which looked like a picturesque grassy field with mountains. The mice ran on a special ball, while monkeys and humans used trackballs. They could look around freely as they moved towards the leaves.
Using their paths in the VR, we measured their performance in five different ways: accuracy (how many times they guessed right), precision (how accurately they approached the objects), bias (whether they tended to favor one object over the other), reaction time (how fast they moved), and speed (how quickly they went through the environment).
Breaking Down Performance
By analyzing these five measures, we could get a clearer picture of how each species performed based on their attentional state. For example, if they were very accurate but slow, they were likely in a careful state, while someone who rushed and made mistakes would be in a less focused state.
To better understand these States, we used some fancy statistical modeling techniques that divided performance into four categories: distracted (slow and inaccurate), deliberate (slow but accurate), impulsive (fast but inaccurate), and efficient (fast and accurate).
Key Observations
When we looked at the data, we found that all three species spent roughly the same amount of time in these attention states. They had moments of being in one state for several trials at a time, leading to the conclusion that attention fluctuates but seems to follow a similar pattern across species.
Interestingly, the time spent in states didn’t just reflect the quality of the task. We noticed a rhythm in state duration, suggesting that the way attention fluctuates is less about the task at hand and more about how the animals generally manage their focus.
Attention Over Time
We also investigated the duration of attention states. It appears that animals stay in one state for around six trials before shifting to a different one. Certain species, like humans, tended to spend longer in accurate states compared to less accurate ones.
When we plotted the transitions between the states, we found a pattern. Animals were more likely to switch within a state category than to jump between different categories. For instance, a mouse that was distracted was more likely to stay distracted or move to an impulsive state rather than suddenly shift to a careful, accuracy-focused state.
The Rhythm of Attention
By examining how often states shifted, we discovered a rhythm in how long attention states lasted. Surprisingly, all three species displayed a similar peak in attention cycles, suggesting there might be an evolutionary aspect to how attention works across mammals. The rhythm for monkeys and humans was around 55 trials, while for mice, it hit around 70 trials.
This finding hinted that not only is sustained attention important, but it also follows a certain rhythm that might be hardwired into these species.
Task Influence on Attention
Now, you might be wondering whether the difficulty of the task played a role in these attention shifts. Our findings showed that the transitions from one attention state to another were largely unaffected by how tough the task was. While harder tasks slowed down reactions, this didn’t change the internal mechanisms that govern attention fluctuations.
This suggests that the way attention shifts happens primarily within the animal's own control, rather than being directly shaped by how challenging the task is.
Conclusions
In the end, our study revealed that animals can be quite similar in how they pay attention across different species, even when engaged in different tasks. We found shared characteristics in attention states, their durations, and how often they switched between them.
This kind of research might help scientists better understand cognitive processes not just in animals, but in humans too. It may lead to more effective strategies for studying attention-related conditions like ADHD in both humans and animals.
Who knew comparing attention could be so enlightening? Maybe next time you find yourself zoning out during a meeting, you can remind yourself that even in nature, attention is a tricky beast to wrangle!
Title: Sharing the Spotlight: Uncovering common attentional dynamics across species
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.
Authors: Mina Glukhova, Alejandro Tlaie, Raul Muresan, Robert Taylor, Pierre-Antoine Ferracci, Katharine Shapcott, Olga Arne, Andrei Ciuparu, Martha N Havenith, Marieke L Schölvinck
Last Update: Nov 1, 2024
Language: English
Source URL: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.01.621490
Source PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.01.621490.full.pdf
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Changes: This summary was created with assistance from AI and may have inaccuracies. For accurate information, please refer to the original source documents linked here.
Thank you to biorxiv for use of its open access interoperability.