The literature has long emphasized the neocortex's role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortexlike cells. We used Posner's classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of water at it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like "volitional" facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared on the side indicated by the precue were faster than their reaction times to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhibition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emerges only in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believe that this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary connection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of a centrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literature on human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies has been strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and for the study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.volitional orienting | subcortical regions | endogenous orienting | IOR | attention H umans are commonly assumed to have volitional abilities that species lacking a neocortex (e.g., fish and amphibians) do not have. The literature has long emphasized the role of cortical mechanisms in these exclusive cognitive abilities. But is a neocortex necessary for a species to manifest behaviors that have been attributed to volitional control? To examine this question, we tested whether the archer fish (Toxotes chatareus) is capable of endogenous orienting.Driven by bottom-up stimulation, reflexive orienting is fast and automatic as a result of tuning through natural selection. Volitional orienting is relatively nonreflexive and is tuned to local contingencies and/or the immediate goals of the individual (1). In the current study, we adopt the typical perspective regarding spatial attention, as put forward by Posner (2), which is characterized by two distinctions: whether covert or overt adjustments are made, and whether these adjustments are under endogenous (volitional) or exogenous (reflexive) control. The most common methods for examining reflexive and volitional attentional processes are two versions of Posner's cuing task (2, 3). In this task, participants are presented with a cue followed by a peripheral target to which they are instructed to respond. Two task properties are important for determining which mode of orienting is generated. The first is whether or not the cue is informative about the location of the upcoming target, and the second is whether or not the input pathway of the upcoming target might be stimulated by the cue. When studying reflexive orienting, the peripheral location where a target might appear, or one nearby, is stimulated by a cue...

A major challenge for neuropsychological research arises from the fact that we are dealing with a limited resource: the patients. Not only is it difficult to identify and recruit these individuals, but their ability to participate in research projects can be limited by their medical condition. As such, sample sizes are small, and considerable time (e.g., 2 years) is required to complete a study. To address limitations inherent to laboratory-based neuropsychological research, we developed a protocol for online neuropsychological testing (PONT). We describe the implementation of PONT and provide the required information and materials for recruiting participants, conducting remote neurological evaluations, and testing patients in an automated, self-administered manner. The protocol can be easily tailored to target a broad range of patient groups, especially those who can be contacted via support groups or multisite collaborations. To highlight the operation of PONT and describe some of the unique challenges that arise in online neuropsychological research, we summarize our experience using PONT in a research program involving individuals with Parkinson's disease and spinocerebellar ataxia. In a 10-month period, by contacting 646 support group coordinators, we were able to assemble a participant pool with over 100 patients in each group from across the United States. Moreover, we completed six experiments (n > 300) exploring their performance on a range of tasks examining motor and cognitive abilities. The efficiency of PONT in terms of data collection, combined with the convenience it offers the participants, promises a new approach that can increase the impact of neuropsychological research.

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Scientific investigations have long emphasized the cortex’s role in cognitive transfer and arithmetic abilities. To date, however, this assumption has not been thoroughly empirically investigated. Here we demonstrated that primitive mechanisms—lower visual channels—have a causal role in cognitive transfer of complex skills such as symbolic arithmetic. We found that exposing only one monocular channel to a visuospatial training resulted in a larger transfer effect in the trained monocular channel compared to the untrained monocular channel. Such cognitive transfer was found for both novel figural-spatial problems (near transfer) and novel subtraction problems (far transfer). Importantly, the benefits of the trained eye were not observed in old problems and in other tasks that did not involve visuospatial abilities (the Stroop task, a multiplication task). These results challenge the exclusive role of the cortex in cognitive transfer and complex arithmetic. In addition, the results suggest a new mechanism for the emergence of cognitive skills, that could be shared across different species.