Individual strategies for ignoring irrelevant information are reflected in distinct neural signatures during temporal attention.

Abstract

Attentional functions enable the nervous system to regulate incoming information, selecting what is behaviorally relevant while filtering out distractions. To investigate attentional control in rats, we developed a paradigm in which animals are required to ignore an irrelevant tactile stimulus (a vibration) and categorize the relevant one as weak or strong. Stimuli were separated in time but delivered to the same set of vibrissae, making this a temporal rather than spatial attention task. In the first task version, the irrelevant stimulus was presented first and the relevant second. Across animals, we observed substantial variability in how this task was learned and performed, consistent with emerging work showing that learning unfolds along idiosyncratic trajectories rather than converging on a single behavioral solution. While the irrelevant stimulus typically exerted an attractive bias on judgments, some rats progressively reduced this influence and achieved near-complete suppression, transitioning from a proficient to an expert stage of performance. Other animals, however, adopted alternative stable strategies and did not exhibit comparable levels of attentional filtering. To probe behavioral flexibility, we designed a version of the task in which the relevant stimulus could appear in either temporal position. Under these conditions, rats generally struggled to flexibly allocate attention across time, again with substantial variability across individuals. Importantly, behavioral analyses indicate that this variability is not random but reflects a small number of reproducible strategy classes, characterized by distinct patterns of sensitivity to stimulus order. These findings suggest that attentional control in this task does not rely on a single canonical algorithm, but instead emerges from a constrained set of alternative solutions. Electrophysiological recordings from a limited number of animals revealed neural correlates consistent with these behavioral differences. In expert animals performing the original task, neuronal populations in motor cortex showed differential encoding of the irrelevant and relevant stimuli. In a proficient animal implanted in both vS1 and M1/M2, outcome-dependent modulation was prominent in vS1, whereas M1/M2 transformed sensory inputs into categorical representations with partial suppression of the irrelevant stimulus. Local field potential analyses further indicated that effective task performance was associated with increased high gamma synchronization between vS1 and M1/M2, alongside low-beta modulation consistent with top-down interactions. Taken together, these results suggest that learning to ignore irrelevant information reshapes interactions between sensory and motor cortices, but that this process unfolds heterogeneously across individuals. Rather than reflecting a single mechanism of attentional control, the data support a framework in which multiple, identifiable strategies coexist within a shared task structure, underscoring the importance of individual differences in understanding the neural basis of attention.