Sharing the Spotlight: Uncovering common attentional dynamics across species

Abstract

Sustained attention is a key underlying process to many natural behaviours that are shared by multiple species. Yet the way it is commonly studied in a lab context precludes any meaningful cross-species comparisons. Here, we engaged mice, monkeys, and humans in the exact same, natural perceptual decision task in a VR environment. We captured their behaviour into several parameters along the speed/accuracy axes along which sustained attention is classically defined, and used HMMs to infer four attentional states. We show that the dynamics of these states, both in terms of their durations as well as the transitions between them, are much more similar between the species than might have been expected. Moreover, attentional state fluctuations seem to be internally generated. The task and analyses developed here represent a new approach to compare sustained attention across species in an objective, data-driven way.