Attention modulation of neural tuning through peak and base rate

This study investigates the influence of attention modulation on neural tun ing functions. It has been shown in experiments that attention modulation a lters neural tuning curves. Attention has been considered at least to serve to resolve limiting capacities and to increase the sensitivity to attended stimulus, while the exact functions of attention are still under debate. I nspired by recent experimental results on attention modulation, we investig ate the influence of changes in the height and base rate of the tuning curv e on the encoding accuracy, using the Fisher information. Under an assumpti on of stimulus-conditional independence of neural responses, we derive expl icit conditions that determine when the height and base rate should be incr eased or decreased to improve encoding accuracy. Notably, a decrease in the tuning height and base rate can improve the encoding accuracy in some case s. Our theoretical results can predict the effective size of attention modu lation on the neural population with respect to encoding accuracy. We discu ss how our method can be used quantitatively to evaluate different aspects of attention function.