Top-Down Control of Human Visual Cortex by Frontal and Parietal Cortex in Anticipatory Visual Spatial Attention

Bressler, Steven L.; Tang, Wei; Sylvester, Chad M.; Shulman, Gordon L.; Corbetta, Maurizio

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.1776-08.2008

Cited by 520 publications

(432 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In that sense it is closely related to the concept of densely connected "rich-club" nodes (36). Given these topological properties and its location primarily in frontal cortex, the core appears to be in an ideal position to exert control over the periphery (4,30,40,41). We interpret the increased core closeness of taskrelevant areas to reflect an enhancement in bidirectional information flow.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Predicting errors from reconfiguration patterns in human brain networks

Ekman

Derrfuß

Tittgemeyer

et al. 2012

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

157

143

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Task preparation is a complex cognitive process that implements anticipatory adjustments to facilitate future task performance.Little is known about quantitative network parameters governing this process in humans. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional connectivity measurements, we show that the large-scale topology of the brain network involved in task preparation shows a pattern of dynamic reconfigurations that guides optimal behavior. This network could be decomposed into two distinct topological structures, an error-resilient core acting as a major hub that integrates most of the network's communication and a predominantly sensory periphery showing more flexible network adaptations. During task preparation, core-periphery interactions were dynamically adjusted. Task-relevant visual areas showed a higher topological proximity to the network core and an enhancement in their local centrality and interconnectivity. Failure to reconfigure the network topology was predictive for errors, indicating that anticipatory network reconfigurations are crucial for successful task performance. On the basis of a unique network decoding approach, we also develop a general framework for the identification of characteristic patterns in complex networks, which is applicable to other fields in neuroscience that relate dynamic network properties to behavior. graph theory | attention | cognitive control T he human brain forms a highly complex network that is organized into a large number of specialized regions. During goal-directed behavior, like the preparation of an upcoming task, relevant cortical regions are anticipatorily modulated (1-5), which has been shown to facilitate the detection and analysis of task-relevant stimuli (6-13).However, little is known about how these task-specific adjustments are integrated across distinct brain regions and how preparatory mechanisms are reflected in a large-scale network topology (14-16). It has been shown that attention can modulate interarea correlations between distant cortical regions, independent from changes in regional blood flow (17-19). However, these studies were usually limited to a small selection of cortical regions (2,7,15,(18)(19)(20). With recent developments in functional connectivity analysis, it has become possible to study the role of large-scale networks for cognitive processing and to quantify network properties using global and local graph theoretical measures (21-26).On the one hand, task preparation involves dynamic adjustments in regions that carry out computations that are specific to a given task. On the other hand, it also requires the stable maintenance of task goals (7) and reconfigurations of the network based on these goals. Given these characteristics and the organization of brain networks into modules with distinct functional properties (27, 28), we hypothesized that task-specific processes, whose involvement varies from trial to trial, are reflected in dynamic adjustments of more peripheral components of the brain network. We...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…During goal-directed behavior, like the preparation of an upcoming task, relevant cortical regions are anticipatorily modulated (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), which has been shown to facilitate the detection and analysis of task-relevant stimuli (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting errors from reconfiguration patterns in human brain networks

Ekman

Derrfuß

Tittgemeyer

et al. 2012

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

157

143

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“…Spatial attention studies have consistently implicated a fronto-parietal network as the source of spatial attention biases in visual cortex (24). Activity in this network precedes activity in visual cortex (25), and activity within these source regions is spatially specific (26). A similar fronto-parietal network has been implicated in feature-based attention (27), and feature-specific responses have been reported in parietal cortex (22).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

A neural basis for real-world visual search in human occipitotemporal cortex

Peelen

Kästner

2011

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

143

179

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Mammals are highly skilled in rapidly detecting objects in cluttered natural environments, a skill necessary for survival. What are the neural mechanisms mediating detection of objects in natural scenes? Here, we use human brain imaging to address the role of top-down preparatory processes in the detection of familiar object categories in real-world environments. Brain activity was measured while participants were preparing to detect highly variable depictions of people or cars in natural scenes that were new to the participants. The preparation to detect objects of the target category, in the absence of visual input, evoked activity patterns in visual cortex that resembled the response to actual exemplars of the target category. Importantly, the selectivity of multivoxel preparatory activity patterns in object-selective cortex (OSC) predicted target detection performance. By contrast, preparatory activity in early visual cortex (V1) was negatively related to search performance. Additional behavioral results suggested that the dissociation between OSC and V1 reflected the use of different search strategies, linking OSC preparatory activity to relatively abstract search preparation and V1 to more specific imagery-like preparation. Finally, whole-brain searchlight analyses revealed that, in addition to OSC, response patterns in medial prefrontal cortex distinguished the target categories based on the search cues alone, suggesting that this region may constitute a top-down source of preparatory activity observed in visual cortex. These results indicate that in naturalistic situations, when the precise visual characteristics of target objects are not known in advance, preparatory activity at higher levels of the visual hierarchy selectively mediates visual search.T he selection of complex stimuli, such as objects, from cluttered environments presents a complicated problem: during real-world visual search, objects are present at unspecified locations and may have an almost infinite number of possible visual appearances. Despite these difficulties, the detection of highly familiar object categories (e.g., people or cars) in natural scenes has been shown to be remarkably fast (1). Surprisingly, such detection is even possible in the near absence of spatial attention, by stark contrast to the detection of simple feature conjunctions (e.g., discriminating "T" from "L") under comparable task conditions (2). On the basis of these and other findings, it has been suggested that mechanisms related to the visual search for familiar objects in natural scenes may differ from those related to the visual search for simple shapes in artificial scenes, such as typically studied in the laboratory (3). In the present study, we investigated the brain mechanisms mediating the selection of objects in real-world scenes. Specifically, we addressed the role and nature of top-down preparatory processes in the detection of familiar object categories in daily life environments.Theoretical accounts of visual search hold that top-down preparatio...

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“…Although many of the searchlight-defined frontoparietal ROIs discussed in the preceding section have been previously implicated in cognitive control (Koechlin et al, 2003;Bressler et al, 2008;Esterman et al, 2009;Bichot et al, 2015;Marshall et al, 2015), it is unclear what role(s) they serve in the current experiment. Based on earlier work (Esterman et al, 2009;Liu et al, 2011;Liu, 2016;Riggall and Postle, 2012), we reasoned that regions engaged in top-down control over visual selection would contain a representation of what task participants were instructed to perform, i.e., attend orientation vs. attend luminance.…”

Section: Representations Of Orientation In "Task-selective" Roismentioning

confidence: 82%

Feature-Selective Attentional Modulations in Human Frontoparietal Cortex

Ester

Sutterer

Serences

et al. 2016

Journal of Neuroscience

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Control over visual selection has long been framed in terms of a dichotomy between "source" and "site," where top-down feedback signals originating in frontoparietal cortical areas modulate or bias sensory processing in posterior visual areas. This distinction is motivated in part by observations that frontoparietal cortical areas encode task-level variables (e.g., what stimulus is currently relevant or what motor outputs are appropriate), while posterior sensory areas encode continuous or analog feature representations. Here, we present evidence that challenges this distinction. We used fMRI, a roving searchlight analysis, and an inverted encoding model to examine representations of an elementary feature property (orientation) across the entire human cortical sheet while participants attended either the orientation or luminance of a peripheral grating. Orientation-selective representations were present in a multitude of visual, parietal, and prefrontal cortical areas, including portions of the medial occipital cortex, the lateral parietal cortex, and the superior precentral sulcus (thought to contain the human homolog of the macaque frontal eye fields). Additionally, representations in many-but not all-of these regions were stronger when participants were instructed to attend orientation relative to luminance. Collectively, these findings challenge models that posit a strict segregation between sources and sites of attentional control on the basis of representational properties by demonstrating that simple feature values are encoded by cortical regions throughout the visual processing hierarchy, and that representations in many of these areas are modulated by attention.

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Top-Down Control of Human Visual Cortex by Frontal and Parietal Cortex in Anticipatory Visual Spatial Attention

Cited by 520 publications

References 33 publications

Predicting errors from reconfiguration patterns in human brain networks

Predicting errors from reconfiguration patterns in human brain networks

A neural basis for real-world visual search in human occipitotemporal cortex

Feature-Selective Attentional Modulations in Human Frontoparietal Cortex

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