electrical neuroimaging reveals timing of attentional control activity in human brain电神经影像揭示了人类大脑注意力控制活动的时机.pdfVIP

PLoS BIOLOGY Electrical Neuroimaging Reveals Timing of Attentional Control Activity in Human Brain * Jessica J. Green , John J. McDonald Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada 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. Citation: Green JJ, McDonald JJ (2008) Electrical neuroimaging reveals timing of attentional control activity in human brain. PLoS Biol 6(4): e81. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060081 Introduction analytical techniques; see [16–18]). Advances in event-rel