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Selection and suppression of visual information in the macaque prefrontal cortex

In everyday life, we are continuously struggling at focusing on our current goals while at the same time avoiding distractions. Attention is the neuro-cognitive process devoted to the selection of behaviorally relevant sensory information while at the same time preventing distraction by irrelevant information. Visual selection can be implemented by both long-term (learning-based spatial prioritization) and short term (dynamic spatial attention) mechanisms. On the other hand, distraction can be prevented proactively, by strategically prioritizing task-relevant information at the expense of irrelevant information, or reactively, by actively suppressing the processing of distractors. The distinctive neuronal signature of each of these four processes is largely unknown. Likewise, how selection and suppression mechanisms interact to drive perception has never been explored neither at the behavioral nor at the neuronal level. Here, we apply machine-learning decoding methods to prefrontal cortical (PFC) activity to monitor dynamic spatial attention with an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. This leads to several novel observations. We first identify independent behavioral and neuronal signatures for learning-based attention prioritization and dynamic attentional selection. Second, we identify distinct behavioral and neuronal signatures for proactive and reactive suppression mechanisms. We find that while distracting task-relevant information is suppressed proactively, task-irrelevant information is suppressed reactively. Critically, we show that distractor suppression, whether proactive or reactive, strongly depends on both learning-based attention prioritization and dynamic attentional selection. Overall, we thus provide a unified neuro-cognitive framework describing how the prefrontal cortex implements spatial selection and distractor suppression in order to flexibly optimize behavior in dynamic environments.