[Cortical Functional Connectivity during Cued vs. Implicit Modality-Specific Anticipatory Attention: EEG-Source Alpha...

The brain functional organization was studied in a group of healthy right-handed adults (N= 16, mean age = 23 ± 5.7) during preparation for visual and auditory sensory tasks in two conditions: (1) participants waited for appearance of either a visual or an auditory stimulus after being cued about its sensory modality (the cued anticipatory attention) or (2) they developed implicit anticipation of stimulus in the course of repetitive exposure to the same sequence of visual and auditory stimuli pairs. In both cases, participants were asked to discriminate the temporal order of stimuli presentation within a pair of either visual or auditory modality. The functional connectivity was assessed via alpha coherence computed in the source space for preselected regions of interests. For both visual and auditory modalities, increase of strength of functional links among cortical areas involved in the fronto-parietal attention system is found during the cued attention when compared to nonspecific sustained attention. An increase is also observed in the connection strengths between sensory-specific and associative (parietal and prefrontal) areas. In visual modality, the buildup of implicit anticipation was accompanied by the strengthening of functional links between the ventral premotor cortex and caudal (parietal and occipital) areas of the right hemisphere. In the case of auditory task, the increase of connection strengths within fronto-temporal cortical areas was observed. These areas included the rostral supplementary motor areas, ventral premotor cortices and primary auditory cortices.