Modeling attention and binding in the brain through bidirectional recurrent gating

Salehi, Saeed, Lei, Jordan, Benjamin, Ari S, Muller, Klaus-Robert, Kording, Konrad P (May 2026) Modeling attention and binding in the brain through bidirectional recurrent gating. Nature Communications, 17 (1). ISSN 2041-1723 (Public Dataset)

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Abstract

Attention is a cornerstone of cognition and neural computation, enabling the brain to select relevant information, bind features into coherent objects, and guide behavior. However, we currently lack a unifying computational model that connects the diverse phenomena of attention, from spatial and feature-based selection to object-based binding, within a single, neurally plausible computational framework. Here, we propose a bidirectional recurrent gating mechanism integrated into a principled architecture of the ventral visual stream. In this architecture, feedforward pathways extract visual features, while top-down and lateral connections transmit context- and task-dependent modulatory signals that control information flow. We demonstrate that our model, trained on recognition and segmentation problems, successfully performs the canonical attention tasks of orienting, filtering, and visual search on complex scenes. It replicates key psychophysical phenomena, such as perceptual load and inattentional blindness, while its internal units develop neural properties consistent with primate physiology, including multiplicative gain modulation and border-ownership coding. Our work provides evidence that this diverse set of attentional and binding phenomena can emerge from error-backpropagation combined with architectural constraints upon information flow, offering a powerful tool for neuroscience and a compelling, bio-inspired alternative to standard AI architectures.

Item Type:	Paper
Subjects:	neurobiology neurobiology > neuroscience
CSHL Authors:	Benjamin, Ari
Communities:	CSHL labs > Zador lab CSHL Post Doctoral Fellows
SWORD Depositor:	CSHL Elements
Depositing User:	CSHL Elements
Date:	5 May 2026
Date Deposited:	11 May 2026 13:22
Last Modified:	11 May 2026 13:22
PMCID:	PMC13144683
Related URLs:	Publisher
Dataset ID:	https://github.com/ssnio/bio-attention https://github.com/ssnio/bio-attention/tree/main/data http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/ https://cocodataset.org/ https://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/CelebA.html https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html
URI:	https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/42196

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