Individual strategies for ignoring irrelevant information are reflected in distinct behavioral and neural signatures during temporal attention.

Executive functions enable the nervous system to regulate the continuous stream of incoming information by selecting behaviorally relevant signals and filtering out distracting inputs. Through studies in rats and humans, this thesis seeks to advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms that support the selective processing of relevant information. To investigate attentional control in rats, we developed a behavioral paradigm in which animals learned to judge a relevant tactile stimulus while ignoring an irrelevant one. The perceptual judgment required animals to categorize the relevant vibrissal vibration as weak or strong according to its intensity. Rats achieved proficient performance, defined as assigning greater decisional weight to the relevant stimulus than to the irrelevant stimulus. Nevertheless, the irrelevant stimulus exerted an attractive bias on judgments of the relevant stimulus. A subset of rats subsequently mastered the task and progressed from proficient to expert performance, defined as the ability to ignore the irrelevant stimulus completely. In this initial task, the relevant stimulus was always presented in the second temporal position. To test attentional flexibility, we developed a second, dynamic version of the task in which the relevant stimulus could appear in either the first or the second position. In this variant, rats had difficulty flexibly allocating attention across time. Electrophysiological recordings from two expert rats implanted in primary and secondary motor cortex (M1/M2) while performing the initial task revealed distinct neural representations of relevant and irrelevant stimuli. In addition, recordings from a proficient rat implanted in both primary vibrissal somatosensory cortex (vS1) and M1/M2 suggested that outcome-dependent attentional modulation was localized to vS1, whereas M1/M2 transformed weak sensory signals into robust categorical representations while partially suppressing irrelevant information. Analyses of local field potentials further indicated that accurate stimulus representation was supported by high-gamma synchronization between vS1 and M1/M2. Moreover, M1/M2 appeared to influence vS1 through top-down modulation in the low-beta frequency range. Together, these behavioral and neural findings demonstrate that learning to ignore irrelevant information reshapes how neuronal populations in vS1 and M1/M2 interact and encode task relevant variables. To assess the cross-species generalizability of these behavioral dynamics, we tested human participants using a task analogous to the dynamic paradigm used in rats. As expected, humans achieved higher overall performance. A cluster-based analysis revealed a striking divergence between species: whereas rats exhibited an attractive bias induced by the irrelevant stimulus, a subgroup of human participants displayed a repulsive bias. This finding suggests that the two species may rely on different cognitive strategies to solve the task. Overall, these findings provide novel, multiscale evidence of temporal attentional abilities in the rat tactile system and broaden our understanding of temporal tactile attention in humans.