From behavior to neural dynamics: An integrated theory of attention

By Timothy J. Buschman, Sabine Kastner. 2015

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The brain has a limited capacity and therefore needs mechanisms to selectively enhance the information most relevant to one’s current behavior. We refer to these mechanisms as ‘attention’. Attention acts by increasing the strength of selected neural representations and preferentially routing them through the brain’s large-scale network. This is a critical component of cognition and therefore has been a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. Here we review a diverse literature that has studied attention at the level of behavior, networks, circuits and neurons. We then integrate these disparate results into a unified theory of attention.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Heterogeneity within the frontoparietal control network and its relationship to the default and dorsal attention networks (2017, background): “It contains neurons with spatially organized receptive fields (25, 27) that are activated during saccades (28), shifts of attention to salient objects in the external environment (29–31), and during visually guided reaching actions (24, 32).”
The Role of Fronto‐Central Theta Oscillations in Inter‐Sensory Selective Attention (2025, unknown): “Participants performing better under informative conditions (i.e., responders) exhibited greater non- phase-locked theta over the frontal midline area at 200–400 ms post-cue onset, which possibly indicates preparatory neuronal activity during the cue-target interval (Buschman and Kastner 2015).”
Slow neural oscillations explain temporal fluctuations in distractibility (2023, background): “Originally assumed to be static (Posner et al., 1980), the attentional spotlight was proposed to be blinking at a subsecond time scale in a theta-like rhythm (i.e., 3 – 8 Hz) (Buschman & Kastner, 2015; Fiebelkorn & Kastner, 2019).”
Nested oscillations and brain connectivity during sequential stages of feature-based attention (2020, background): “The results therefore point to an aspecific enhancement of large-scale network communication that facilitates information routing while preparing for an attended stimulus to appear (Buschman and Kastner, 2015; Fries, 2015).”
Functional Specialization in the Attention Network (2019, background): “These studies have investigated how nodes of the attention network dynamically interact to filter sensory information within different functional and behavioral contexts (Buschman & Kastner 2015).”