Sonarlogger: Enabling long-term underwater sonar observations.

Coastal seas are under increasing pressure from extreme weather events and sea level rise, resulting in impacts such as changing hydrodynamic conditions, coastal erosion, and marine heat waves. To monitor changes in coastal marine habitats, such as reefs and macrophytes meadows, which add to the resilience of our coasts, consistent, medium- to long-term seafloor observations are needed. This project aims to deliver repeated, high-frequency sonar surveys on a stationary seabed mooring of a specific target area over a period of up to several months.

Task-dependent spatial selectivity in the primate amygdala.

Humans and other animals routinely encounter visual stimuli that indicate whether future reward delivery depends upon the identity or location of a stimulus, or the performance of a particular action. These reinforcement contingencies can influence how much attention is directed toward a stimulus. Neurons in the primate amygdala encode information about the association between visual stimuli and reinforcement as well as about the location of reward-predictive stimuli.

Amygdala neural activity reflects spatial attention towards stimuli promising reward or threatening punishment.

Humans and other animals routinely identify and attend to sensory stimuli so as to rapidly acquire rewards or avoid aversive experiences. Emotional arousal, a process mediated by the amygdala, can enhance attention to stimuli in a non-spatial manner. However, amygdala neural activity was recently shown to encode spatial information about reward-predictive stimuli, and to correlate with spatial attention allocation.

The amygdala and basal forebrain as a pathway for motivationally guided attention.

Visual stimuli associated with rewards attract spatial attention. Neurophysiological mechanisms that mediate this process must register both the motivational significance and location of visual stimuli. Recent neurophysiological evidence indicates that the amygdala encodes information about both of these parameters.

The primate amygdala combines information about space and value.

A stimulus predicting reinforcement can trigger emotional responses, such as arousal, and cognitive ones, such as increased attention toward the stimulus. Neuroscientists have long appreciated that the amygdala mediates spatially nonspecific emotional responses, but it remains unclear whether the amygdala links motivational and spatial representations. To test whether amygdala neurons encode spatial and motivational information, we presented reward-predictive cues in different spatial configurations to monkeys and assessed how these cues influenced spatial attention.

Reward modulates attention independently of action value in posterior parietal cortex.

While numerous studies have explored the mechanisms of reward-based decisions (the choice of action based on expected gain), few have asked how reward influences attention (the selection of information relevant for a decision). Here we show that a powerful determinant of attentional priority is the association between a stimulus and an appetitive reward. A peripheral cue heralded the delivery of reward or no reward (these cues are termed herein RC+ and RC-, respectively); to experience the predicted outcome, monkeys made a saccade to a target that appeared unpredictably at the same or opposite location relative to the cue.