When attended and conscious perception deactivates fronto-parietal regions

Abstract

The finding of increased fronto-parietal activity during conscious and attended perception forms a key basis for theories of consciousness and attention. However, this finding comes largely from studies that required explicit detection of events in a way that made detection the goal of the ongoing task. This is an important confound because goal completion itself elicits fronto-parietal activity. In everyday life attended and conscious perception is instrumental in achieving our goals but rarely a goal in itself. Here we examined whether conscious perception that was instrumental to participants' current goals, but not a goal in itself, elicited increased fronto-parietal activity. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants attended to a stream of letters (1 per second) to detect occasional targets in their midst. We found that consciousness of, and attention to, these highly visible non-targets events deactivated fronto-parietal regions. In Experiment 3 participants heard a loud auditory cue that had to be retained in memory for up to 9 sec before being used to select the correct rule for completing the goal. No increased fronto-parietal activity was observed even for such salient, attended and remembered event. In contrast, robust fronto-parietal activation was observed across all the experiments for goal completion events. The results indicate that increased fronto-parietal activity is not a necessary correlate of conscious and attended perception. We speculate that fronto-parietal deactivation during non-target events may be related to the suppression of potential interference from salient, conscious, but non-goal stimuli.

The relationship between attention and consciousness: an expanded taxonomy and implications for ‘no-report’ paradigms

“…Thus, even though neural activity associated with perceiving a task-relevant stimulus (report condition) versus a task-irrelevant stimulus (no-report condition) could be compared, we were unable to make the critical contrast between perceived versus not-perceived stimuli. This same limitation applies to two recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments that attempted to test the contribution of frontal cortical areas to conscious perception [110,115]. Farooqui & Manly [115] reported deactivations of frontal cortical areas for non-target stimuli that were clearly seen.…”

“…This same limitation applies to two recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments that attempted to test the contribution of frontal cortical areas to conscious perception [110,115]. Farooqui & Manly [115] reported deactivations of frontal cortical areas for non-target stimuli that were clearly seen. Wiegand et al [110] showed that some (but not all) of the frontal activity observed in a perceived versus nonperceived contrast for task-relevant stimuli disappeared during a separate experiment when the same stimuli were always perceived, but were irrelevant to the task.…”

Neural basis of somatosensory target detection independent of uncertainty, relevance, and reports

“…2. Target detection is the explicit behavioural goal of the task and therefore, detected targets have higher behavioural relevance than undetected targets (Farooqui and Manly, 2018). 3.…”

“…We dissociate corresponding representations in the brain by means of Bayesian Model Selection (BMS, Stephan, Penny, Daunizeau, Moran, & Friston, 2009), which determines which model best explains the data in every voxel of the brain based on model evidence maps. Building on insights from the visual modality (Farooqui and Manly, 2018; Frässle et al, 2014; Koch et al, 2016), we hypothesise that BOLD responses associated with target detection are restricted to somatosensory regions, whereas activity in the frontoparietal network reflects cognitive processes that follow from task requirements.…”

Transient Topographical Dynamics of the Electroencephalogram Predict Brain Connectivity and Behavioural Responsiveness During Drowsiness

“…In EEG, the disruption of connectivity between frontal and parietal electrodes at alpha (8–12 Hz) frequencies has been shown to occur in disorders of consciousness (Chennu et al 2014a , b ) and sedation (Chennu et al 2016a , b ). Although it is still debated whether these are signatures of conscious processing or of processes that almost invariably accompany it (Farooqui and Manly 2017 ), brain connectivity patterns currently provide, in practice, useful insights into the transitions between levels of consciousness.…”