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Updated: Jan 4, 2026
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Methods to Explore the Influence of Top-down Visual Processes on Motor Behavior
Published on: April 16, 2014
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Attentional Modulation of Vision Versus Proprioception During Action
Jakub Limanowski1, Karl Friston1
1Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
|November 1, 2019
Summary
Attention can shift how the brain prioritizes visual and proprioceptive body information during action. This top-down control influences multisensory integration for effective movement.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Motor Control
Background:
- The brain integrates visual and proprioceptive cues for body representation and action control.
- Sensory cue weighting is context-dependent and influenced by cue reliability.
- Attention is known to modulate sensory processing in perception, but its role in action-based sensory weighting is less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether endogenous attention modulates the weighting (precision) of visual versus proprioceptive information during action.
- To determine if attentional set influences multisensory integration of body position cues.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed action tasks controlling a virtual hand (VH) or their real hand (RH) under varying sensory congruence and visibility.
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
- Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analyzed effective connectivity and gain modulation between brain regions.
Main Results:
- fMRI showed distinct brain activations: superior parietal lobe (SPL) for VH (visual attention) and secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) for RH (proprioceptive attention).
- DCM revealed that attention selectively modulated the gain of primary visual cortex (V1) and S2.
- These modulations were diametrical, suggesting a balancing act between visual and proprioceptive processing.
Conclusions:
- Endogenous attention dynamically adjusts the gain of visual and proprioceptive processing streams.
- This attentional control mechanism contextualizes the influence of sensory information on multisensory areas involved in body representation for action.
- The findings highlight attention's role in optimizing sensory integration for efficient motor control.
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