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Poster C34 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
A Causal Role for the Posterior Parietal Cortex in Mediating Serial Dependence during Visuospatial Attention
Raj V Jain1, Ankita Sengupta1, Devarajan Sridharan1 (); 1Indian Institute of Science
Events in the recent past – even those that are no longer relevant – may be tracked implicitly by the brain and influence our decisions, a phenomenon known as "serial dependence." The precise role of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in mediating serial dependence remains actively researched. Here, we evaluate serial dependencies in behavior with a visuospatial attention task (n=26 participants, n=39000 trials). Training a long short-term memory network (LSTM) to predict participants' trial-wise responses from task variable history, we identify robust serial dependency effects in reaction times. 40-Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over PPC significantly mitigates the magnitude of these serial dependence effects. Expected gradients-based feature attribution traced tACS effects to a reduced impact of selection history associated with attentional cueing. The results reveal a causal role for the PPC in mediating serial dependence in "experience-driven attention'', with critical implications for understanding attentional mechanisms in the human brain.
Keywords: experience-driven attention neurostimulation recurrent neural networks explainable AI