Are you listening? Brain activation associated with sustained nonspatial auditory attention in the presence and absence of stimulation. Hum Brain Mapp 2014 May;35(5):2233-52
Date
08/06/2013Pubmed ID
23913818Pubmed Central ID
PMC6869372DOI
10.1002/hbm.22323Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84898036725 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 23 CitationsAbstract
Neuroimaging studies investigating the voluntary (top-down) control of attention largely agree that this process recruits several frontal and parietal brain regions. Since most studies used attention tasks requiring several higher-order cognitive functions (e.g. working memory, semantic processing, temporal integration, spatial orienting) as well as different attentional mechanisms (attention shifting, distractor filtering), it is unclear what exactly the observed frontoparietal activations reflect. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated, within the same participants, signal changes in (1) a "Simple Attention" task in which participants attended to a single melody, (2) a "Selective Attention" task in which they simultaneously ignored another melody, and (3) a "Beep Monitoring" task in which participants listened in silence for a faint beep. Compared to resting conditions with identical stimulation, all tasks produced robust activation increases in auditory cortex, cross-modal inhibition in visual and somatosensory cortex, and decreases in the default mode network, indicating that participants were indeed focusing their attention on the auditory domain. However, signal increases in frontal and parietal brain areas were only observed for tasks 1 and 2, but completely absent for task 3. These results lead to the following conclusions: under most conditions, frontoparietal activations are crucial for attention since they subserve higher-order cognitive functions inherently related to attention. However, under circumstances that minimize other demands, nonspatial auditory attention in the absence of stimulation can be maintained without concurrent frontal or parietal activations.
Author List
Seydell-Greenwald A, Greenberg AS, Rauschecker JPAuthor
Adam S. Greenberg PhD Associate Dean, Associate Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
Acoustic StimulationAdult
Attention
Brain
Brain Mapping
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Linear Models
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Oxygen
Photic Stimulation
Space Perception
Statistics as Topic
Young Adult