Sharing the spotlight: Uncovering common attentional dynamics across species

Sustained attention is a key underlying process to many natural behaviours that are shared across species. Yet the way attention is commonly studied in a lab context precludes meaningful cross-species comparisons. Here, we engaged mice, monkeys, and humans in the same, naturalistic perceptual decision task in a virtual reality environment. We captured their behaviour in several parameters along the speed/accuracy axes along which sustained attention is classically defined, and used Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to infer four attentional states. We show that the dynamics of these states, both in terms of their durations and transitions, are more similar across species than might have been expected. Moreover, attentional state fluctuations seem to be internally generated and are not predicted by task attributes. The task and analyses developed here represent a new approach to infer the dynamics of sustained attention from naturalistic behaviours, in a way that is generalizable across species.Author summary: All animals need attention to survive - it helps to focus on what is important and ignore distractions, sometimes for extended periods. But attention is not steady; it fluctuates naturally. To understand how attention works, it is useful to compare how it functions across different species. Most studies, however, look at attention in simplistic and artificial settings, making this comparison difficult. In this study, we engaged mice, monkeys, and humans in the same, naturalistic task within a virtual reality environment. By tracking behaviour over time, we identified distinct attention states and how they change during task performance. We found that all three species showed surprisingly similar patterns of attentional fluctuations, suggesting that the mechanisms behind this process may be conserved. Our work shows that using more intuitive and naturalistic tasks can help understand fundamental cognitive processes and provide insights into attention-related disorders such as ADHD.