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.