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Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
Interactions between voluntary and stimulus-driven spatial attention mechanisms across sensory modalities
Valerio Santangelo1, Marta Olivetti Belardinelli, Charles Spence
1Neuroimaging Laboratory, Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy. v.santangelo@gmail.com
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
|February 10, 2009
Summary
Multisensory attention integrates voluntary and stimulus-driven cues. Auditory stimuli can reduce the brain
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Neuroscience of Attention
- Multisensory Integration
Background:
- Spatial attention allocation involves voluntary (endogenous) and stimulus-driven (exogenous) processes.
- Cross-sensory links influence attentional control, integrating information from different modalities.
- Understanding the neural basis of these interactions is crucial for cognitive science.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the physiological basis of multisensory attentional interactions using fMRI.
- To examine how exogenous auditory attention modulates endogenous visual attention.
- To determine how cross-modal attention influences visuospatial reorienting.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to measure brain activity.
- Participants performed an endogenous visuospatial cueing task with visual targets.
- Task-irrelevant, nonpredictive auditory stimuli were presented to induce exogenous shifts in auditory spatial attention.
Main Results:
- Activation of the ventral fronto-parietal attentional network was observed during endogenous invalid trials (visuospatial reorienting).
- The location of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli modulated these network activations.
- Auditory stimulus presentation on the same side as the invalid visual target reduced spatial reorienting effects.
Conclusions:
- Multisensory attentional mechanisms integrate endogenous and exogenous spatial information.
- Cross-modal attention plays a role in jointly determining attentional orienting.
- These findings highlight the dynamic interplay between different attentional control systems.
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