scholarly journals Attentional selection of location and modality in vision and touch modulates low-frequency activity in associated sensory cortices

2012 ◽  
Vol 107 (9) ◽  
pp. 2342-2351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Bauer ◽  
Steffan Kennett ◽  
Jon Driver
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Occipital Cortex ◽  
Sensory Cortex ◽  
Sensory Cortices ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity ◽  
Selection Of

Selective attention allows us to focus on particular sensory modalities and locations. Relatively little is known about how attention to a sensory modality may relate to selection of other features, such as spatial location, in terms of brain oscillations, although it has been proposed that low-frequency modulation (α- and β-bands) may be key. Here, we investigated how attention to space (left or right) and attention to modality (vision or touch) affect ongoing low-frequency oscillatory brain activity over human sensory cortex. Magnetoencephalography was recorded while participants performed a visual or tactile task. In different blocks, touch or vision was task-relevant, whereas spatial attention was cued to the left or right on each trial. Attending to one or other modality suppressed α-oscillations over the corresponding sensory cortex. Spatial attention led to reduced α-oscillations over both sensorimotor and occipital cortex contralateral to the attended location in the cue-target interval, when either modality was task-relevant. Even modality-selective sensors also showed spatial-attention effects for both modalities. The visual and sensorimotor results were generally highly convergent, yet, although attention effects in occipital cortex were dominant in the α-band, in sensorimotor cortex, these were also clearly present in the β-band. These results extend previous findings that spatial attention can operate in a multimodal fashion and indicate that attention to space and modality both rely on similar mechanisms that modulate low-frequency oscillations.

Neural Mechanisms of Visual Attention: Object-Based Selection of a Region in Space

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (supplement 2) ◽  
pp. 106-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Arrington ◽  
Thomas H. Carr ◽  
Andrew R. Mayer ◽  
Stephen M. Rao
Keyword(s):  
Visual Attention ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Temporal Cortex ◽  
Brain Structures ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Areas ◽  
Unbounded Region ◽  
Object Based ◽  
Selection Of

Objects play an important role in guiding spatial attention through a cluttered visual environment. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to measure brain activity during cued discrimination tasks requiring subjects to orient attention either to a region bounded by an object (object-based spatial attention) or to an unbounded region of space (location-based spatial attention) in anticipation of an upcoming target. Comparison between the two tasks revealed greater activation when attention selected a region bounded by an object. This activation was strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere and formed a widely distributed network including (a) attentional structures in parietal and temporal cortex and thalamus, (b) ventral-stream object processing structures in occipital, inferior-temporal, and parahippocampal cortex, and (c) control structures in medial-and dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that object-based spatial selection is achieved by imposing additional constraints over and above those processes already operating to achieve selection of an unbounded region. In addition, ER-fMRI methodology allowed a comparison of validly versus invalidly cued trials, thereby delineating brain structures involved in the reorientation of attention after its initial deployment proved incorrect. All areas of activation that differentiated between these two trial types resulted from greater activity during the invalid trials. This outcome suggests that all brain areas involved in attentional orienting and task performance in response to valid cues are also involved on invalid trials. During invalid trials, additional brain regions are recruited when a perceiver recovers from invalid cueing and reorients attention to a target appearing at an uncued location. Activated brain areas specific to attentional reorientation were strongly right-lateralized and included posterior temporal and inferior parietal regions previously implicated in visual attention processes, as well as prefrontal regions that likely subserve control processes, particularly related to inhibition of inappropriate responding.

scholarly journals Spatial Attention Evokes Similar Activation Patterns for Visual and Auditory Stimuli

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
David V. Smith ◽  
Ben Davis ◽  
Kathy Niu ◽  
Eric W. Healy ◽  
Leonardo Bonilha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Brain Activation ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Activation Patterns ◽  
Central Target ◽  
Neuroimaging Study ◽  
Auditory Tasks ◽  
Selection Of

Neuroimaging studies suggest that a fronto-parietal network is activated when we expect visual information to appear at a specific spatial location. Here we examined whether a similar network is involved for auditory stimuli. We used sparse fMRI to infer brain activation while participants performed analogous visual and auditory tasks. On some trials, participants were asked to discriminate the elevation of a peripheral target. On other trials, participants made a nonspatial judgment. We contrasted trials where the participants expected a peripheral spatial target to those where they were cued to expect a central target. Crucially, our statistical analyses were based on trials where stimuli were anticipated but not presented, allowing us to directly infer perceptual orienting independent of perceptual processing. This is the first neuroimaging study to use an orthogonal-cuing paradigm (with cues predicting azimuth and responses involving elevation discrimination). This aspect of our paradigm is important, as behavioral cueing effects in audition are classically only observed when participants are asked to make spatial judgments. We observed similar fronto-parietal activation for both vision and audition. In a second experiment that controlled for stimulus properties and task difficulty, participants made spatial and temporal discriminations about musical instruments. We found that the pattern of brain activation for spatial selection of auditory stimuli was remarkably similar to what we found in our first experiment. Collectively, these results suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting spatial attention are largely similar across both visual and auditory modalities.

scholarly journals Lip movements entrain the observers’ low-frequency brain oscillations to facilitate speech intelligibility

eLife ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyojin Park ◽  
Christoph Kayser ◽  
Gregor Thut ◽  
Joachim Gross
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Visual Speech ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Partial Coherence ◽  
Auditory Speech ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity

During continuous speech, lip movements provide visual temporal signals that facilitate speech processing. Here, using MEG we directly investigated how these visual signals interact with rhythmic brain activity in participants listening to and seeing the speaker. First, we investigated coherence between oscillatory brain activity and speaker’s lip movements and demonstrated significant entrainment in visual cortex. We then used partial coherence to remove contributions of the coherent auditory speech signal from the lip-brain coherence. Comparing this synchronization between different attention conditions revealed that attending visual speech enhances the coherence between activity in visual cortex and the speaker’s lips. Further, we identified a significant partial coherence between left motor cortex and lip movements and this partial coherence directly predicted comprehension accuracy. Our results emphasize the importance of visually entrained and attention-modulated rhythmic brain activity for the enhancement of audiovisual speech processing.

scholarly journals Preparatory α-band oscillations reflect spatial gating independently of predictions regarding target identity

2017 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 1385-1394 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Wildegger ◽  
F. van Ede ◽  
M. Woolrich ◽  
C. R. Gillebert ◽  
A. C. Nobre
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Target ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Visual Orientation ◽  
Spatial Cues ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Improved Performance ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Α Band

Preparatory modulations of cortical α-band oscillations are a reliable index of the voluntary allocation of covert spatial attention. It is currently unclear whether attentional cues containing information about a target’s identity (such as its visual orientation), in addition to its location, might additionally shape preparatory α modulations. Here, we explore this question by directly comparing spatial and feature-based attention in the same visual detection task while recording brain activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG). At the behavioral level, preparatory feature-based and spatial attention cues both improved performance and did so independently of each other. Using MEG, we replicated robust α lateralization following spatial cues: in preparation for a visual target, α power decreased contralaterally and increased ipsilaterally to the attended location. Critically, however, preparatory α lateralization was not significantly modulated by predictions regarding target identity, as carried via the behaviorally effective feature-based attention cues. Furthermore, nonlateralized α power during the cue-target interval did not differentiate between uninformative cues and cues carrying feature-based predictions either. Based on these results we propose that preparatory α modulations play a role in the gating of information between spatially segregated cortical regions and are therefore particularly well suited for spatial gating of information. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The present work clarifies if and how human brain oscillations in the α-band support multiple types of anticipatory attention. Using magnetoencephalography, we show that posterior α-band oscillations are modulated by predictions regarding the spatial location of an upcoming visual target, but not by feature-based predictions regarding its identity, despite robust behavioral benefits. This provides novel insights into the functional role of preparatory α mechanisms and suggests a limited specificity with which they may operate.

scholarly journals Retinotopic-like maps of spatial sound in primary ‘visual’ cortex of blind human echolocators

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1912) ◽  
pp. 20191910 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam J. Norman ◽  
Lore Thaler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Primary Visual Cortex ◽  
Functional Organization ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Spatial Sound ◽  
Sensory Cortices ◽  
Spatial Locations ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Rule Out

The functional specializations of cortical sensory areas were traditionally viewed as being tied to specific modalities. A radically different emerging view is that the brain is organized by task rather than sensory modality, but it has not yet been shown that this applies to primary sensory cortices. Here, we report such evidence by showing that primary ‘visual’ cortex can be adapted to map spatial locations of sound in blind humans who regularly perceive space through sound echoes. Specifically, we objectively quantify the similarity between measured stimulus maps for sound eccentricity and predicted stimulus maps for visual eccentricity in primary ‘visual’ cortex (using a probabilistic atlas based on cortical anatomy) to find that stimulus maps for sound in expert echolocators are directly comparable to those for vision in sighted people. Furthermore, the degree of this similarity is positively related with echolocation ability. We also rule out explanations based on top-down modulation of brain activity—e.g. through imagery. This result is clear evidence that task-specific organization can extend even to primary sensory cortices, and in this way is pivotal in our reinterpretation of the functional organization of the human brain.

scholarly journals Spatiotemporal dynamics of auditory attention synchronize with speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (14) ◽  
pp. 3873-3878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Wöstmann ◽  
Björn Herrmann ◽  
Burkhard Maess ◽  
Jonas Obleser
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Hemispheric Lateralization ◽  
Speech Comprehension ◽  
Alpha Power

Attention plays a fundamental role in selectively processing stimuli in our environment despite distraction. Spatial attention induces increasing and decreasing power of neural alpha oscillations (8–12 Hz) in brain regions ipsilateral and contralateral to the locus of attention, respectively. This study tested whether the hemispheric lateralization of alpha power codes not just the spatial location but also the temporal structure of the stimulus. Participants attended to spoken digits presented to one ear and ignored tightly synchronized distracting digits presented to the other ear. In the magnetoencephalogram, spatial attention induced lateralization of alpha power in parietal, but notably also in auditory cortical regions. This alpha power lateralization was not maintained steadily but fluctuated in synchrony with the speech rate and lagged the time course of low-frequency (1–5 Hz) sensory synchronization. Higher amplitude of alpha power modulation at the speech rate was predictive of a listener’s enhanced performance of stream-specific speech comprehension. Our findings demonstrate that alpha power lateralization is modulated in tune with the sensory input and acts as a spatiotemporal filter controlling the read-out of sensory content.

Neural Substrates of Perceptual Enhancement by Cross-Modal Spatial Attention

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. McDonald ◽  
Wolfgang A. Teder-Sälejärvi ◽  
Francesco Di Russo ◽  
Steven A. Hillyard
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Temporal Cortex ◽  
Electrode Array ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Occipital Cortex ◽  
Neural Substrates ◽  
Superior Temporal Cortex ◽  
Related Potentials

Orienting attention involuntarily to the location of a sudden sound improves perception of subsequent visual stimuli that appear nearby. The neural substrates of this cross-modal attention effect were investigated by recording event-related potentials to the visual stimuli using a dense electrode array and localizing their brain sources through inverse dipole modeling. A spatially nonpredictive auditory precue modulated visual-evoked neural activity first in the superior temporal cortex at 120–140 msec and then in the ventral occipital cortex of the fusiform gyrus 15–25 msec later. This spatio-temporal sequence of brain activity suggests that enhanced visual perception produced by the cross-modal orienting of spatial attention results from neural feedback from the multimodal superior temporal cortex to the visual cortex of the ventral processing stream.

The Effects of l-theanine on Alpha-Band Oscillatory Brain Activity During a Visuo-Spatial Attention Task

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Gomez-Ramirez ◽  
Simon P. Kelly ◽  
Jennifer L. Montesi ◽  
John J. Foxe
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Alpha Band ◽  
Attention Task ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity

The Attenuation of Very Low Frequency Brain Oscillations in Transitions from a Rest State to Active Attention

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 191-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzannah K. Helps ◽  
Samantha J. Broyd ◽  
Christopher J. James ◽  
Anke Karl ◽  
Edmund J. S. Sonuga-Barke
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sampling Rate ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Adhd Symptoms ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Very Low Frequency ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Interference Hypothesis ◽  
Mode Interference

Background: The default mode interference hypothesis ( Sonuga-Barke & Castellanos, 2007 ) predicts (1) the attenuation of very low frequency oscillations (VLFO; e.g., .05 Hz) in brain activity within the default mode network during the transition from rest to task, and (2) that failures to attenuate in this way will lead to an increased likelihood of periodic attention lapses that are synchronized to the VLFO pattern. Here, we tested these predictions using DC-EEG recordings within and outside of a previously identified network of electrode locations hypothesized to reflect DMN activity (i.e., S3 network; Helps et al., 2008 ). Method: 24 young adults (mean age 22.3 years; 8 male), sampled to include a wide range of ADHD symptoms, took part in a study of rest to task transitions. Two conditions were compared: 5 min of rest (eyes open) and a 10-min simple 2-choice RT task with a relatively high sampling rate (ISI 1 s). DC-EEG was recorded during both conditions, and the low-frequency spectrum was decomposed and measures of the power within specific bands extracted. Results: Shift from rest to task led to an attenuation of VLFO activity within the S3 network which was inversely associated with ADHD symptoms. RT during task also showed a VLFO signature. During task there was a small but significant degree of synchronization between EEG and RT in the VLFO band. Attenuators showed a lower degree of synchrony than nonattenuators. Discussion: The results provide some initial EEG-based support for the default mode interference hypothesis and suggest that failure to attenuate VLFO in the S3 network is associated with higher synchrony between low-frequency brain activity and RT fluctuations during a simple RT task. Although significant, the effects were small and future research should employ tasks with a higher sampling rate to increase the possibility of extracting robust and stable signals.

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