Causal role of the prefrontal cortex in top-down modulation of visual processing and working memory

By Theodore P. Zanto, Michael T. Rubens, A. Thangavel, Adam Gazzaley. 2011

677 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Selective attention filters information to limit what is encoded and maintained in working memory. Although the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to both selective attention and working memory, the underlying neural processes that link these cognitive abilities remain elusive. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to guide repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation with electroencephalographic recordings in humans, we perturbed PFC function at the inferior frontal junction in participants before they performed a selective-attention, delayed-recognition task. This resulted in diminished top-down modulation of activity in posterior cortex during early encoding stages, which predicted a subsequent decrement in working memory accuracy. Participants with stronger fronto-posterior functional connectivity displayed greater disruptive effects. Our data further suggests that broad alpha-band (7–14 Hz) phase coherence subserved this long-distance top-down modulation. These results suggest that top-down modulation mediated by the prefrontal cortex is a causal link between early attentional processes and subsequent memory performance.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond Skip Connections: Top-Down Modulation for Object Detection (2016, background): “There is strong evidence of such top-down context, feedback and lateral processing in the human visual pathway [7, 13, 15, 25, 28, 30, 31, 37, 53, 54]; wherein, the topdown signals are responsible for modulating low-level features [13, 15, 37, 53, 54] as well as act as attentional mechanism for sele”
Measuring and manipulating brain connectivity with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) (2012, methodology): “tude of TMS-induced changes to the strength of the functional connectivity between regions (Zanto et al., 2011), or showing that TMS to a connected region not modulated by the task has an effect on task performance will be important in clarifying these issues.”
Executive Functions (2012, positive): “…stimuli, older adults show normal enhancement of the to-be-attended stimuli but little or no suppression of the to-be-ignored stimuli, leading Zanto et al. (2011) to conclude that enhancement and suppression rely on distinct mechanisms, that “suppression is not simply lack of enhancement”…”
Multimodal neuroimaging of hierarchical cognitive control. (2024, unknown): “…investigated the different types of control signals that might emanate from the LPFC. Zanto and colleagues used fMRI to guide 1-Hz rTMS (applied for 10 minutes) to disrupt the function of the right inferior frontal junction (IFJ) during the performance of a working memory task (Zanto et al., 2011).”
Tuning out emotional distractors by tuning in theta rhythm: improving visual working memory using transcranial magnetic stimulation (2026, unknown): “We hypothesized that rhythmic TMS aimed at increasing theta rhythm over the left DLPFC would reduce the vWM performance gap between neutral and emotional auditory distractors, compared to sham TMS.”
Dynamic signatures of the Eureka effect: an EEG study (2021, unknown): “Alpha oscillations have been suggested to serve the suppression of irrelevant information in tasks requiring focusing attention (Clarke et al., 2008; Zanto et al., 2010; Zanto et al., 2011; Klimesch, 2012), to coordinate widely distributed processes by playing the role of a carrier frequency for the”
Network-Targeted, Multi-site Direct Cortical Stimulation Enhances Working Memory by Modulating Phase Lag of Low-Frequency Oscillations (2019, methodology): “We chose 10 Hz as the stimulation frequency for P3, as alpha band synchronization between frontal and parietal regions has been shown to affect WM (Palva et al., 2010; Zanto et al., 2011).”