Electrical Neuroimaging Reveals Timing of Attentional Control Activity in Human Brain

By Jessica J. Green, John J. McDonald. PLoS Biology, 2008

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Voluntarily shifting attention to a location of the visual field improves the perception of events that occur there. Regions of frontal cortex are thought to provide the top-down control signal that initiates a shift of attention, but because of the temporal limitations of functional brain imaging, the timing and sequence of attentional-control operations remain unknown. We used a new analytical technique (beamformer spatial filtering) to reconstruct the anatomical sources of low-frequency brain waves in humans associated with attentional control across time. Following a signal to shift attention, control activity was seen in parietal cortex 100–200 ms before activity was seen in frontal cortex. Parietal cortex was then reactivated prior to anticipatory biasing of activity in occipital cortex. The magnitudes of early parietal activations were strongly predictive of the degree of attentional improvement in perceptual performance. These results show that parietal cortex, not frontal cortex, provides the initial signals to shift attention and indicate that top-down attentional control is not purely top down.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44f4277d34a973d0c5a23039e28e1b0f6a244afe

How researchers see this paper

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Marisa Carrasco
2. Céline C Haciahmet
3. Bernhard Pastötter
4. Christian Frings
5. Ali Borji
6. Laurent Itti

Citations in the corpus

• Visual attention: The past 25 years (2011, background): “Although there is agreement on the crucial role of the frontoparietal network in attentional control (e.g., Green & Mcdonald, 2008; Hopfinger et al., 2000; Lauritzen, D’Esposito, Heeger, & Silver, 2009), it is possible that the surround inhibition may be partly due to long range horizontal…”
• Target Amplification and Distractor Inhibition: Theta Oscillatory Dynamics of Selective Attention in a Flanker Task (2020, background): “The target amplification effect in parietal theta power is in line with previous research that proposed parietal theta power indexing the initiation of attentional control in nonconflict tasks (Green & McDonald, 2008).”