Attentional modulation of effective connectivity from V2 to V5/MT in humans.

By Karl J. Friston, Christian Büchel. 2000

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The nonlinear nature of integration among cortical brain areas renders the effective connectivity between them inherently dynamic and context-sensitive. One emerging architectural principle of functional brain organization, which rests explicitly on these nonlinear interactions, is that neuronal responses expressed at any level in a sensory hierarchy reflect an interaction between (i) bottom up "driving" afferents from lower cortical areas and (ii) backwards "modulatory" inputs from higher areas that mediate top-down contextual effects. A compelling example is attentional modulation of responses in functionally specialized sensory areas. The aim of this work was to demonstrate that parietal regions may mediate selective attention to motion by modulating the effective connectivity from early visual cortex to the motion-sensitive area V5/MT. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and an analysis of effective connectivity based on nonlinear system identification, we found that backwards modulatory influences from the posterior parietal cortex are sufficient to account for a significant component of attentional modulation of V5/MT responses to "driving" inputs from V2. By explicitly modeling interactions among inputs to V5/MT, we were able to make inferences about the influences of V2 inputs and their concomitant activity-dependent modulation by parietal afferents. The latter effects embody dynamic changes in effective connectivity that may underlie attentional mechanisms. These results speak to the context-sensitive nature of functional integration in the brain and provide empirical evidence that attentional effects may be mediated by backwards connections, of a modulatory sort, in humans.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Nonlinear Dynamic Causal Models for fMRI (2008, unknown): “A few previous studies of effective connectivity have modelled changes in connection strength as a function of activity in a different region (Friston et al., 1995; Büchel and Friston, 1997: Friston et al., 1997; Friston and Büchel, 2000).”
Selectionist and Evolutionary Approaches to Brain Function: A Critical Appraisal (2012, methodology): “Whilst those models are intended to show attentional top-down modulation of bottom-up driving connections (Friston and Buchel, 2000), here”
Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. (2002, background): “Top-down feedback is known to alter connectivity (Friston and BuÈchel, 2000).”
Statistical parametric mapping (2013, methodology): “The form for ƒ(x), proposed in Friston et al (1996a), was a nonlinear autoregression model that used polynomial expansions to second order.”
Mapping directed influence over the brain using Granger causality and fMRI (2005, background): “The Volterra series representation (Friston and Buchel, 2000) characterizes interactions in a nonlinear convolution model relating multiple inputs to a single output.”
Disambiguating Visual Motion Through Contextual Feedback Modulation (2004, background): “The computational logic of recurrent feedback processing between two areas is that the higher area integrates localized measures from the lower area over a larger spatial range, or neighborhood, and thus evaluates these signals in a much larger context (Hupé et al., 2001; Friston & Büchel, 2000).”
Are Subitizing and Counting Implemented as Separate or Functionally Overlapping Processes? (2002, background): “, 1999) and may be one of the areas in which activity is strongly influenced by top-down attentional modulatory input from parietal cortex (Friston and Bùchel, 2000; Chawla et al., 1999).”
Dynamic causal modelling (2003, methodology): “In short, we already have established that the superior posterior parietal cortex (SPC) exerts a modulatory role on V5 responses using Volterra-based regression models (Friston and Büchel, 2000) and that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) exerts a similar influence on SPC using structural equation mod”
Separate conflict-specific cognitive control mechanisms in the human brain (2007, background): “The superior parietal cortex in particular has been shown to mediate the attentional top-down influence of prefrontal regions on the processing of task-relevant stimulus features in extrastriate cortex, as shown in fMRI studies of effective connectivity (Buchel and Friston, 1997; Friston and Buchel,”
Measuring functional connectivity during distinct stages of a cognitive task (2004, background): “, 1996, 1994), or from within-subject correlations in the fMRI time series data, which can only be done for blocked design experiments (Buchel and Friston, 1997; Buchel et al., 1999; Friston and Buchel, 2000; Goncalves et al., 2001; Maguire et al., 2000; Rowe et al., 2002; Toni et al., 2002).”
From cognitive to neural models of working memory (2007, methodology): “…data (Friston et al. 1993; McIntosh 1998), which thus far have been used to investigate functional connectivity in many cognitive domains, such as learning (Buchel et al. 1999; Toni et al. 2002), attention (Friston & Buchel 2000; Rowe et al. 2002) and long-term memory (Maguire et al. 2000).”
Modelling functional integration: a comparison of structural equation and dynamic causal models. (2004, background): “In previous work, we have established that attention modulates connectivity in a distributed system of cortical regions mediating visual motion processing (Buchel and Friston, 1997; Friston and Buchel, 2000).”
Theories of developmental dyslexia: insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults. (2003, background): “At least in the visual domain, the ubiquity of such top-down enhancement in sensory hierarchies is increasingly demonstrated in single-cell recordings and brain imaging studies (Friston and BuÈchel, 2000; Lamme and Roelfsema, 2000; O'Connor et al., 2002).”
The Weak Coherence Account: Detail-focused Cognitive Style in Autism Spectrum Disorders (2006, background): “Frith (1989) drew attention to the tendency for typically developing children and adults to process incoming information for meaning and gestalt (global) form, often at the expense of attention to or memory for details and surface structure.”
Comparing dynamic causal models (2004, background): “In previous work, we have established that attention modulates connectivity in a distributed system of cortical regions mediating visual motion processing (Buchel and Friston, 1997; Friston and Buchel, 2000).”
Investigating directed cortical interactions in time-resolved fMRI data using vector autoregressive modeling and Granger causality mapping. (2003, background): “Significant methodological developments, such as the application of covariance structural equation modeling [4] and nonlinear system identification techniques [5] to neuroimaging data, have supported the idea that a statistical model of interacting neuronal systems can be obtained from metabolic/hem”
Target Amplification and Distractor Inhibition: Theta Oscillatory Dynamics of Selective Attention in a Flanker Task (2020, background): “…to PFC and ACC, it is a prominent view that, in non-conflict tasks (e.g., attention-cuing tasks), the parietal cortex mediates (or even initiates) attentional control and the processing of attended stimulus information (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Friston & Büchel, 2000; Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000).”