Occipitoparietal alpha-band responses to the graded allocation of top-down spatial attention

2014 ◽  
Vol 112 (6) ◽  
pp. 1307-1316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Dombrowe ◽  
Claus C. Hilgetag
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Alpha Band ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
Parietal Lobes ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Entire Visual Field ◽  
Band Activity

The voluntary, top-down allocation of visual spatial attention has been linked to changes in the alpha-band of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal measured over occipital and parietal lobes. In the present study, we investigated how occipitoparietal alpha-band activity changes when people allocate their attentional resources in a graded fashion across the visual field. We asked participants to either completely shift their attention into one hemifield, to balance their attention equally across the entire visual field, or to attribute more attention to one-half of the visual field than to the other. As expected, we found that alpha-band amplitudes decreased stronger contralaterally than ipsilaterally to the attended side when attention was shifted completely. Alpha-band amplitudes decreased bilaterally when attention was balanced equally across the visual field. However, when participants allocated more attentional resources to one-half of the visual field, this was not reflected in the alpha-band amplitudes, which just decreased bilaterally. We found that the performance of the participants was more strongly reflected in the coherence between frontal and occipitoparietal brain regions. We conclude that low alpha-band amplitudes seem to be necessary for stimulus detection. Furthermore, complete shifts of attention are directly reflected in the lateralization of alpha-band amplitudes. In the present study, a gradual allocation of visual attention across the visual field was only indirectly reflected in the alpha-band activity over occipital and parietal cortexes.

scholarly journals Visual predictions, neural oscillations and naïve physics

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake W. Saurels ◽  
Wiremu Hohaia ◽  
Kielan Yarrow ◽  
Alan Johnston ◽  
Derek H. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Dynamic Environment ◽  
Predictive Performance ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Internal Models ◽  
Oscillatory Activity ◽  
Alpha Band ◽  
Core Property ◽  
Ball Tracking ◽  
Band Activity

AbstractPrediction is a core function of the human visual system. Contemporary research suggests the brain builds predictive internal models of the world to facilitate interactions with our dynamic environment. Here, we wanted to examine the behavioural and neurological consequences of disrupting a core property of peoples’ internal models, using naturalistic stimuli. We had people view videos of basketball and asked them to track the moving ball and predict jump shot outcomes, all while we recorded eye movements and brain activity. To disrupt people’s predictive internal models, we inverted footage on half the trials, so dynamics were inconsistent with how movements should be shaped by gravity. When viewing upright videos people were better at predicting shot outcomes, at tracking the ball position, and they had enhanced alpha-band oscillatory activity in occipital brain regions. The advantage for predicting upright shot outcomes scaled with improvements in ball tracking and occipital alpha-band activity. Occipital alpha-band activity has been linked to selective attention and spatially-mapped inhibitions of visual brain activity. We propose that when people have a more accurate predictive model of the environment, they can more easily parse what is relevant, allowing them to better target irrelevant positions for suppression—resulting in both better predictive performance and in neural markers of inhibited information processing.

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

2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (40) ◽  
pp. 10056-10061 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. L. Bressler ◽  
W. Tang ◽  
C. M. Sylvester ◽  
G. L. Shulman ◽  
M. Corbetta
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Parietal Cortex ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Human Visual Cortex ◽  
Visual Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Spatial

scholarly journals Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

eLife ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Szinte ◽  
Donatas Jonikaitis ◽  
Dragan Rangelov ◽  
Heiner Deubel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Receptive Fields ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Visual Scene ◽  
Attentional Allocation ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Saccadic Remapping

Each saccade shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are predictively remapped to account for these shifts. While remapping of the whole visual scene seems prohibitively complex, selection by attention may limit these processes to a subset of attended locations. Because attentional selection consumes time, remapping of attended locations should evolve in time, too. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention-capturing cue at different times before a saccade and constructed maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed no remapping of attention when the cue appeared shortly before saccade. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade, attentional resources were reallocated precisely to the remapped location. Our results show that pre-saccadic remapping takes time to develop suggesting that it relies on the spatial and temporal dynamics of spatial attention.

Large-scale Networks for Attentional Biases

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna C. (Kia) Nobre ◽  
M-Marsel Mesulam
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Selective Attention ◽  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Receptive Fields ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Visual Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Spatial

Selective attention is essential for all aspects of cognition. Using the paradigmatic case of visual spatial attention, we present a theoretical account proposing the flexible control of attention through coordinated activity across a large-scale network of brain areas. It reviews evidence supporting top-down control of visual spatial attention by a distributed network, and describes principles emerging from a network approach. Stepping beyond the paradigm of visual spatial attention, we consider attentional control mechanisms more broadly. The chapter suggests that top-down biasing mechanisms originate from multiple sources and can be of several types, carrying information about receptive-field properties such as spatial locations or features of items; but also carrying information about properties that are not easily mapped onto receptive fields, such as the meanings or timings of items. The chapter considers how selective biases can operate on multiple slates of information processing, not restricted to the immediate sensory-motor stream, but also operating within internalized, short-term and long-term memory representations. Selective attention appears to be a general property of information processing systems rather than an independent domain within our cognitive make-up.

Time-Course of Top-Down Shifts of Covert Visual Spatial Attention

NeuroImage ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. S66
Author(s):  
JB Ewen ◽  
DM Caggiano ◽  
BM Lakshmanan ◽  
H Rosen ◽  
S Yantis
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Visual Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Spatial

scholarly journals Top-down flow of visual spatial attention signals from parietal to occipital cortex

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (13) ◽  
pp. 18-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Z. Lauritzen ◽  
M. D'Esposito ◽  
D. J. Heeger ◽  
M. A. Silver
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Occipital Cortex ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Visual Spatial Attention ◽  
Visual Spatial

scholarly journals Alpha-band Activity Tracks the Zoom Lens of Attention

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-282
Author(s):  
Tobias Feldmann-Wüstefeld ◽  
Edward Awh
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Alpha Activity ◽  
Target Display ◽  
Zoom Lens ◽  
Alpha Band ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Spatial Selectivity ◽  
Baseline Shift ◽  
Band Activity

Voluntary control over spatial attention has been likened to the operation of a zoom lens, such that processing quality declines as the size of the attended region increases, with a gradient of performance that peaks at the center of the selected area. Although concurrent changes in activity in visual regions suggest that zoom lens adjustments influence perceptual stages of processing, extant work has not distinguished between changes in the spatial selectivity of attention-driven neural activity and baseline shift of activity that can increase mean levels of activity without changes in selectivity. Here, we distinguished between these alternatives by measuring EEG activity in humans to track preparatory changes in alpha activity that indexed the precise topography of attention across the possible target positions. We observed increased spatial selectivity in alpha activity when observers voluntarily directed attention toward a narrower region of space, a pattern that was mirrored in target discrimination accuracy. Thus, alpha activity tracks both the centroid and spatial extent of covert spatial attention before the onset of the target display, lending support to the hypothesis that narrowing the zoom lens of attention shapes the initial encoding of sensory information.

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