Motivational sharpening of the interaction between spatial attention and motor control: insights from the monkey dorsal premotor cortex

Incentive motivation is believed to influence various cognitive domains to enhance goal-directed behaviour. For example the association of a reward to a specific location drives attention towards that location and influences the motor programmes involved in achieving that goal. However the interaction between motor and attentional systems in response to reward incentives is still poorly understood. To explore this we administered two Posner-style cueing tasks with varying reward incentives to two monkeys while recording neural activity from the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), a key area for preparing goal-directed movements. These two cueing tasks differed in terms of motor engagement and visual analysis required: in Experiment 1 the animals manually reported the detection of a target stimulus in each trial, whereas in Experiment 2 the task followed a Go/NoGo paradigm, where the motor response depended on target identification. Behaviour revealed distinct patterns of attentional deployment and motor responses across the two tasks. Interestingly through time-resolved neural decoding we identified a stronger link between the reward incentives, motor activity and attentional shifts in Experiment 2. Overall our results suggest that motivation plays a critical role in modulating the interplay between spatial attention and motor control, with its effects varying based on the cognitive demands of the task. KEY POINTS: Attention and motivation behaviourally interact in tasks requiring complex executive motor control and demanding visual processing. The dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) changes how it responds to rewards based on what the task requires. The PMd encoding of the target location is impaired by invalid cues in a way that depends on both reward and task demands. PMd activity can shape behavioural responses that are usually linked to spatial attention.