Covert attention for uncertainty reduction during sequential inference

ABSTRACT A major question in attention research is how the brain identifies task-relevant stimuli in the absence of exogenous instructions or cues. Recent studies propose that endogenous attention control expected information gains (EIG) or, equivalently, minimizes decision uncertainty, but the mechanisms of this process are not understood. We show that, in a task in which participants covertly attended to decision-relevant stimuli, their perceptual sensitivity (d’) for discriminating the stimuli depended on the diagnosticity of the stimuli and the participants’ prior decision uncertainty, consistent with Bayesian EIG. The fronto-parietal network, in particular left areas V3A/B and IPS1/2, integrated uncertainty with diagnosticity in a manner correlating with behavioral effects on d’, and uncertainty signals relied on interactions between this network and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The findings show that covert attention can be deployed based on EIG and reveal the neural mechanisms of this process.