Common Neural Recruitment across Diverse Sustained Attention Tasks 英文参考文献.docVIP

CommonNeuralRecruitmentacrossDiverseSustained AttentionTasks JessicaA.Grahn1,3*,TomManly2* 1Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, 2Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire,UnitedKingdom,3DepartmentofPsychology,UniversityofWesternOntario,London,Ontario,Canada Abstract At one level ‘‘sustained attention’’ is simply a description of a task demand. It is often used, however, in reference to a putatively unitary capacity to remain engaged in tasks that are lengthy, dull, repetitive and/or characterised by long intervals between relevant events. Deficits in sustained attention have been reported in a range of clinical conditions. Despite this, there is paucity of well-controlled human functional imaging evidence about regions commonly recruited duringdiversesustainedattentiontasks.Here,forthefirsttime,weusedfunctionalmagneticresonanceimaging(fMRI)to monitor brain activity patterns as healthy volunteers performed two sustained attention tasks. The first, widely used in clinicalassessment,requiredparticipantstocounttonesseparatedbylongunpredictableintervals.Thiswascontrastedwith a control counting condition in which tones were presented at a brisk, regular rate. The second task was the Sustained AttentiontoResponseTest(SART)inwhichparticipantsrespondedtosequentiallypresenteddigitswiththeexceptionofa nominatedinfrequentno-gotarget.Inthecontrolcondition,no-gotrialswereexplicitlyabsent,removingtherequirement tomaintainareadinesstowithholdresponses.Althoughthereweredistinctpatternsofactivationassociatedwitheachtask relativetoitscontrol,activitycommontobothtaskswasfoundinthebilateralinferiorfrontaloperculum,anteriorcingulate, and bilateral premotor cortex. Although some researchers argue for a specific role of the inferior frontal operculum in inhibition,ourresultsareconsistentwithrecentfindingsofamoregeneralattentionalroleforthisarea.Themaintenanceof a goal directed stance in the absence