Does the cerebellum contribute to specific aspects of attention?

Gottwald, Birgit; Mihajlovic, Zoran; Wilde, Barbara; Mehdorn, H. Maximilian

doi:10.1016/s0028-3932(03)00090-3

Cited by 155 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…One alternative explanation for the difference in performance between patients and controls could be based on cognitive demands and the recent implication of the cerebellum in cognition (26)(27)(28)(29). This appears unlikely, as the single-interval timing tasks are less demanding than those of beat-based timing, and as the cognitive deficits demonstrated in patients with cerebellar damage were specific to aspects of executive function or attention (27)(28)(29) and would not lead to the present dissociation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Dissociation of duration-based and beat-based auditory timing in cerebellar degeneration

Grube

Cooper

Chinnery

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

175

183

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This work tests the hypothesis that the cerebellum is critical to the perception of the timing of sensory events. Auditory tasks were used to assess two types of timing in a group of patients with a stereotyped specific degeneration of the cerebellum: the analysis of single time intervals requiring absolute measurements of time, and the holistic analysis of rhythmic patterns based on relative measures of time using an underlying regular beat. The data support a specific role for the cerebellum only in the absolute timing of single subsecond intervals but not in the relative timing of rhythmic sequences with a regular beat. The findings support the existence of a stopwatch-like cerebellar timing mechanism for absolute intervals that is distinct from mechanisms for entrainment with a regular beat.T he relevance of the human cerebellum to the perception of time intervals and rhythmic sequences is controversial. Involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual timing (the perception of the timing of sensory events), in addition to its role in motor timing (the timed execution of movements), has been suggested by a number of studies (1-6). One distinction that we wish to address here, which has not been made clear in previous work, is between the absolute, duration-based timing of single subsecond intervals and the relative timing of subsecond intervals based on a regular beat. Functional imaging studies suggest neural activity in the human cerebellum during the perception of the absolute duration of single time intervals (7,8) as well as rhythmic patterns with a regular beat (9-13). However, previous lesion work to assess an obligatory cerebellar role in the perception of single time intervals has not yielded consistent results (4,(14)(15)(16)(17). Previous lesion work to assess any obligatory role of the cerebellum in the analysis of rhythmic sequences has assessed only deficits in related motor activity, such as tapping out a beat (4,14,18), that do not allow clear inference about perception.In this study, we test whether the cerebellum is a critical substrate for perceptual tasks that require the absolute, durationbased analysis of single time intervals as well as those that require the relative analysis of time intervals within rhythmic patterns based on a regular beat. Perceptual tests were conducted in the auditory domain, where accurate temporal encoding of sensory events is essential and entrainment with a beat is induced naturally. Tasks were administered to a group of 34 patients with a stereotyped cerebellar degeneration and a matched control group of 40 healthy individuals. Two absolute timing tasks tested the perception of single intervals for a variable and a fixed reference duration, respectively ( Fig. 1 A and B). Three relative timing tasks tested the beat-based analysis of rhythmic sequences, including the detection of the presence of a roughly regular beat (19), a deviation from an isochronous beat (20) and a distortion of a rhythmic pattern with a metrical beat (21) (Fig. 1 C-E). The data support a ce...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…This appears unlikely, as the single-interval timing tasks are less demanding than those of beat-based timing, and as the cognitive deficits demonstrated in patients with cerebellar damage were specific to aspects of executive function or attention (27)(28)(29) and would not lead to the present dissociation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Dissociation of duration-based and beat-based auditory timing in cerebellar degeneration

Grube

Cooper

Chinnery

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

175

183

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An alternative interpretation is that the greater left cerebellum activity could be part of a corticocerebellar neural circuit involved in attention to rare events. In support of this idea, fMRI studies have found activity in the posterior cerebellum on attention tasks , and impairments in performance on attention-based cognitive tasks have been found in patients with cerebellar lesions (Gottwald et al, 2003). Courchesne and Allen (1997) have proposed a key role for the cerebellum in preparing and regulating other neural systems of the brain in the service of higher-order cognitive function such as attention.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Hemispheric differences in hemodynamics elicited by auditory oddball stimuli

Stevens¹,

Calhoun²,

Kiehl³

2005

NeuroImage

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Evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests that the right hemisphere of the human brain might be more specialized for attention than the left hemisphere. However, differences between right and left hemisphere in the magnitude of hemodynamic activity (i.e., 'functional asymmetry') rarely have been explicitly examined in previous neuroimaging studies of attention. This study used a new voxelbased comparison method to examine hemispheric differences in the amplitude of the hemodynamic response in response to infrequent target, infrequent novel, and frequent standard stimuli during an event-related fMRI auditory oddball task in 100 healthy adult participants. Processing of low probability task-relevant target stimuli, or 'oddballs', and low probability task-irrelevant novel stimuli is believed to engage in orienting and attentional processes. It was hypothesized that greater right-hemisphere activation compared to left would be observed to infrequent target and novel stimuli. Consistent with predictions, greater right hemisphere than left frontal, temporal, and parietal lobe activity was observed for target detection and novelty processing. Moreover, asymmetry effects did not differ with respect to age or gender of the participants. The results (1) support the proposal that the right hemisphere is differentially engaged in processing salient stimuli and (2) demonstrate the successful use of a new voxel-based laterality analysis technique for fMRI data. KeywordsOddball; MRI; Brain; Asymmetry; Cognition Attention is believed to involve a distinctive neural network that interacts with other brain systems to facilitate various cognitive processes. Although there are many different operational definitions of attention, it is generally agreed that attention functions to orient to sensory events, to detect specific signals for subsequent processing, and to maintain vigilance over time (Posner and Petersen, 1990). Previous studies have examined attention by measuring brain activity to target stimuli in the context of 'oddball' tasks. Oddball tasks require detection of infrequent target stimuli within the context of frequently presented standard stimuli (Polich and Kok, 1995;Sutton et al., 1965)-for example, the detection of an occasional high-pitched tone in a sequence of low-pitched tones. The process of detecting salient target stimuli is believed to require orienting and allocation of attention, while vigilance is required to maintain task performance. Brain activity during oddball tasks is frequently measured by averaging taskrelated electroencephalogram recordings to produce event-related potentials (ERPs). NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptNeuroimage. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 October 9. Published in final edited form as:Neuroimage. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript of low probability target stimuli produces a characteristic ERP waveform that includes several meaningful components, including the mismatch negativity (MMN;Naatanen et al., 1992) related t...

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“…Patients with cerebellar lesions are impaired in divided-and shifting-attention tasks but are apparently normal in selection tasks that do not require attention shifts (Gottwald et al, 2003). In contrast, Thier et al (1999) showed that attentional effects alone are not able to account for all the visual deficits observed in cerebellar lesion patients.…”

Section: Neural Responses To Varying Levels Of Sensory Signalmentioning

confidence: 96%

Scaling of Neural Responses to Visual and Auditory Motion in the Human Cerebellum

Baumann¹,

Mattingley²

2010

J. Neurosci.

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The human cerebellum contains approximately half of all the neurons within the cerebrum, yet most experimental work in human neuroscience over the last century has focused exclusively on the structure and functions of the forebrain. The cerebellum has an undisputed role in a range of motor functions (Thach et al., 1992), but its potential contributions to sensory and cognitive processes are widely debated (Stoodley and Schmahmann, 2009). Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that the human cerebellum is involved in the acquisition of auditory and visual sensory data. We monitored neural activity within the cerebellum while participants engaged in a task that required them to discriminate the direction of a visual or auditory motion signal in noise. We identified a distinct set of cerebellar regions that were differentially activated for visual stimuli (vermal lobule VI and right-hemispheric lobule X) and auditory stimuli (right-hemispheric lobules VIIIA and VIIIB and hemispheric lobule VI bilaterally). In addition, we identified a region in left crus I in which activity correlated significantly with increases in the perceptual demands of the task (i.e., with decreasing signal strength), for both auditory and visual stimuli. Our results support suggestions of a role for the cerebellum in the processing of auditory and visual motion and suggest that parts of cerebellar cortex are concerned with tracking movements of objects around the animal, rather than with controlling movements of the animal itself (Paulin, 1993).

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Does the cerebellum contribute to specific aspects of attention?

Cited by 155 publications

References 28 publications

Dissociation of duration-based and beat-based auditory timing in cerebellar degeneration

Dissociation of duration-based and beat-based auditory timing in cerebellar degeneration

Hemispheric differences in hemodynamics elicited by auditory oddball stimuli

Scaling of Neural Responses to Visual and Auditory Motion in the Human Cerebellum

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