Top-down Attentional Bias for Perception of Tactile Stimulus Attributes
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1
Charite University Medicine Berlin, BCCN and Department of Neurology, Germany
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2
University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, United Kingdom
The selective nature of human perception implies functional interactions between sensory processing and attentional control. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the cortical network involved in tactile change detection of multiple tactile features. Tactile stimuli of two different spatial patterns that could be presented at one or other temporal frequencies were presented via a fingertip-sized multi-pin stimulation device to the left index finger. The task was to attend to either the spatial pattern or the temporal frequency, in order to detect any occasional change in that respective stimulus attribute. Assessing task-dependent effects revealed a distributed network of somatosensory as well as prefrontal and parietal activations. Frontoparietal components of this network including the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the prefrontal cortex, and the intraparietal sulcus selectively responded to the detection of change in the task-relevant stimulus attribute. An additional analysis of effective connectivity assessed in terms of psychophysiological interactions (PPI; Friston et al. 1997) provided evidence that the primary somatosensory cortex, the secondary somatosensory cortex, and the IFG composed a network related to the functional integration of task-relevant sensory information into tactile processing circuits. Modeling context-dependent causal influences within this functional network using dynamic causal modeling (DCM; Friston et al. 2003) further revealed that the IFG was intimately involved in the coordination of top-down attentional control for specific stimulus features and the processing of bottom-up sensory information.
References
Friston, K.J., Buechel, C., Fink, G.R., Morris, J., Rolls, E., Dolan, R.J. (1997). Psychophysiological and modulatory interactions in neuroimaging. Neuroimage 6, 218-229.
Friston, K., Harrison, L., Penny, W. (2003). Dynamic causal modelling. Neuroimage 19, 1273–1302.
Keywords:
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
psychophysiological interaction analysis (PPI),
selective attention,
sensory processing,
somatosensory,
tactile,
Touch
Conference:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011, Freiburg, Germany, 4 Oct - 6 Oct, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
sensory processing (please use "sensory processing" as keyword)
Citation:
Wacker
E,
Spitzer
B,
Driver
J and
Blankenburg
F
(2011). Top-down Attentional Bias for Perception of Tactile Stimulus Attributes.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
BC11 : Computational Neuroscience & Neurotechnology Bernstein Conference & Neurex Annual Meeting 2011.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2011.53.00139
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Received:
23 Aug 2011;
Published Online:
04 Oct 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Evelin Wacker, Charite University Medicine Berlin, BCCN and Department of Neurology, Berlin, Germany, evelin.wacker@bccn-berlin.de