Are you listening? Brain activation associated with sustained nonspatial auditory attention in the presence and absence of stimulation

• Published in: Human brain mapping 2014-05, Vol.35 (5), p.2233-2252
• Main Authors: Seydell-Greenwald, Anna, Greenberg, Adam S., Rauschecker, Josef P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; attention; Attention - physiology; auditory perception; baseline shift; Biological and medical sciences; Brain - blood supply; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping; default mode network; Ear and associated structures. Auditory pathways and centers. Hearing. Vocal organ. Phonation. Sound production. Echolocation; Female; fMRI; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Investigative techniques, diagnostic techniques (general aspects); Linear Models; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical sciences; Nervous system; Oxygen - blood; Photic Stimulation; Radiodiagnosis. Nmr imagery. Nmr spectrometry; Space Perception - physiology; Statistics as Topic; Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1065-9471; 1097-0193
• DOI: 10.1002/hbm.22323

Neuroimaging studies investigating the voluntary (top‐down) control of attention largely agree that this process recruits several frontal and parietal brain regions. Since most studies used attention tasks requiring several higher‐order cognitive functions (e.g. working memory, semantic processing, temporal integration, spatial orienting) as well as different attentional mechanisms (attention shifting, distractor filtering), it is unclear what exactly the observed frontoparietal activations reflect. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated, within the same participants, signal changes in (1) a “Simple Attention” task in which participants attended to a single melody, (2) a “Selective Attention” task in which they simultaneously ignored another melody, and (3) a “Beep Monitoring” task in which participants listened in silence for a faint beep. Compared to resting conditions with identical stimulation, all tasks produced robust activation increases in auditory cortex, cross‐modal inhibition in visual and somatosensory cortex, and decreases in the default mode network, indicating that participants were indeed focusing their attention on the auditory domain. However, signal increases in frontal and parietal brain areas were only observed for tasks 1 and 2, but completely absent for task 3. These results lead to the following conclusions: under most conditions, frontoparietal activations are crucial for attention since they subserve higher‐order cognitive functions inherently related to attention. However, under circumstances that minimize other demands, nonspatial auditory attention in the absence of stimulation can be maintained without concurrent frontal or parietal activations. Hum Brain Mapp 35:2233–2252, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.