TY - JOUR
T1 - Endogenous orienting in the archer fish
AU - Saban, William
AU - Sekely, Liora
AU - Klein, Raymond M.
AU - Gabay, Shai
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/7/18
Y1 - 2017/7/18
N2 - The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of water at it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like “volitional” facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared on the side indicated by the precue were faster than their reaction times to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhibition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emerges only in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believe that this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary connection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of a centrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literature on human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies has been strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and for the study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.
AB - The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of water at it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like “volitional” facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared on the side indicated by the precue were faster than their reaction times to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhibition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emerges only in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believe that this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary connection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of a centrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literature on human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies has been strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and for the study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.
KW - Attention
KW - Endogenous orienting
KW - IOR
KW - Subcortical regions
KW - Volitional orienting
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85024376080&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1700574114
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1700574114
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C2 - 28673997
AN - SCOPUS:85024376080
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 114
SP - 7577
EP - 7581
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 29
ER -