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Poster A150 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Cortical Semantic Encoding Varies with Attention and Habituation
Isaac Christian1 (), Michael Graziano2, Rachel Metzgar3, Sam Nastase4; 1Princeton University
How do attentional goals bias how the brain encodes semantic content in the external world? We studied brain activity as participants performed two tasks: (1) focusing attention internally and de-emphasizing task-irrelevant external information, and (2) focusing attention externally to enhance task-relevant external information. We presented movie clips to participants while collecting fMRI data. Each clip was repeated four times in sequence to explore how attentional goals interact with novelty. We measured semantic encoding performance as subjects ignored or paid attention to the videos during four repetitions. We used the multimodal transformer model CLIP to determine the extent to which semantic content from the video stimulus was encoded in different regions of the cortex. We found that semantic networks were less sensitive to manipulations of attention while fronto-parietal attention networks and visual cortices encoded the video stimuli in a manner modulated by task goals. More broadly, we show that representation of external content can diminish due to interference from task goals and habituation to the stimulus.
Keywords: semantic encoding attention control habituation CLIP