The human endogenous attentional control network includes a ventro-temporal cortical node

Abstract

Endogenous attention is the cognitive function that selects the relevant pieces of sensory information to achieve goals and it is known to be controlled by dorsal fronto-parietal brain areas. Here we expand this notion by identifying a control attention area located in the temporal lobe. By combining a demanding behavioral paradigm with functional neuroimaging and diffusion tractography, we show that like fronto-parietal attentional areas, the human posterior inferotemporal cortex exhibits significant attentional modulatory activity. This area is functionally distinct from surrounding cortical areas, and is directly connected to parietal and frontal attentional regions. These results show that attentional control spans three cortical lobes and overarches large distances through fiber pathways that run orthogonally to the dominant anterior-posterior axes of sensory processing, thus suggesting a different organizing principle for cognitive control.

Intracortical recordings reveal Vision-to-Action cortical gradients driving human exogenous attention

“…Similarly, Clusters 1, 2 and 3 encompass contacts in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating that when examining in sufficient spatiotemporal resolution, this region, which constitutes a single node of the dorsal attention network (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002), can be dissociated into distinct networks. Furthermore, our findings localizing contacts from Cluster 2 and 3 to the posterior temporal lobe, a region outside the scope of hallmark attention models (Buschman and Kastner, 2015;Corbetta and Shulman, 2002), suggest that this area may contribute to exogenous attention processing, dovetailing recent studies in humans and non-human primates (Sani et al, 2021;Stemmann and Freiwald, 2019). Functionally, our findings suggest that contrary to the stipulations of these models, not only do the prefrontal nodes of the dorsal attention network process information pertaining to the contralateral visual field (Bartolomeo and Seidel Malkinson, 2019;Szczepanski and Kastner, 2013), but rather respond to stimuli in both contralateral and ipsilateral visual fields.…”

Chemogenetic sensory fMRI reveals behaviorally relevant bidirectional changes in primate somatosensory network

“…The threshold for statistical significance was set at p < 0.05 familywise error (FWE) corrected for multiple comparisons or p < 0.001 uncorrected. For ROI analysis of sensory-evoked BOLD signal, percent signal change from baseline was calculated for each functional ROI for each scanning run using MarsBaR region of interest toolbox for SPM (Cle ´ry et al, 2020;Sani et al, 2021;Sharma et al, 2018). Functional ROI in SI D2 was calculated using thresholded (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected) SPM t-maps obtained for control (vehicle) condition, as continuous voxels within a 2-mm radius centered at the local maximum (Bogadhi et al, 2019).…”

Interspecies activation correlations reveal functional correspondences between marmoset and human brain areas

“…Fig. 9), and these areas overlap with the human DMN (Glasser et al, 2016;Ji et al, 2019;Thomas Yeo et al, 2011) which is deactivated during attention demanding tasks (Fox et al, 2005;Sani et al, 2021).…”