A functional hierarchy within the parietofrontal network in stimulus selection and attention control

Although we are confronted with an ever-changing environment, we do not have the capacity to analyze all incoming sensory information. Perception is selective and is guided both by salient events occurring in our visual field and by cognitive premises about what needs our attention. Although the lat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience 2013-05, Vol.33 (19), p.8359-8369
Main Authors: Ibos, Guilhem, Duhamel, Jean-René, Ben Hamed, Suliann
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action Potentials - physiology
Animals
Attention - physiology
Brain Mapping
Cognitive science
Cues
Decision Making - physiology
Female
Frontal Lobe - cytology
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Functional Laterality
Macaca mulatta
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neural Pathways - physiology
Neurons - physiology
Neuroscience
Parietal Lobe - cytology
Parietal Lobe - physiology
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time - physiology
ROC Curve
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Summary:Although we are confronted with an ever-changing environment, we do not have the capacity to analyze all incoming sensory information. Perception is selective and is guided both by salient events occurring in our visual field and by cognitive premises about what needs our attention. Although the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) and frontal eye field (FEF) are known to represent the position of visual attention, their respective contributions to its control are still unclear. Here, we report LIP and FEF neuronal activities recorded while monkeys performed a voluntary attention-orientation target-detection task. We show that both encode behaviorally significant events, but that the FEF plays a specific role in mapping abstract cue instructions onto a spatial priority map to voluntarily guide attention. On the basis of a latency analysis, we show that the coding of stimulus identity and position precedes the emergence of an explicit attentional signal within the FEF. We also describe dynamic temporal hierarchies between LIP and FEF: stimuli carrying the highest intrinsic saliency are signaled by LIP before FEF, whereas stimuli carrying the highest extrinsic saliency are signaled in FEF before LIP. This suggests that whereas the parietofrontal attentional network most probably processes visual information in a recurrent way, exogenous processing predominates in the parietal cortex and the endogenous control of attention takes place in the FEF.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/jneurosci.4058-12.2013