Anticipatory suppression of nonattended locations in visual cortex marks target location and predicts perception.

Full Abstract

Spatial attention is associated with modulations in prestimulus, anticipatory blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity across the brain. It is unclear, however, if these anticipatory modulations depend on the computational demands of the upcoming task. Here, we show that anticipation of low-contrast stimuli, relative to high-contrast stimuli, is associated with increased prestimulus BOLD activity in the frontal eye field (FEF) and the posterior inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) but not in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). In visual cortex, anticipation of low-contrast stimuli is associated with increased suppression of activity corresponding to unattended (but not attended) locations, and this suppression predicts whether subjects will accurately perceive low-contrast stimuli. These results suggest that when a stimulus will be difficult to distinguish from the background, top-down signals from FEF and IFS can facilitate perception by marking its location through the suppression of unattended locations in visual cortex.

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Author information

Author/s: Sylvester, Chad M (CM); Jack, Anthony I (AI); Corbetta, Maurizio (M); Shulman, Gordon L (GL);

Affiliation: Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110, USA. chad@npg.wustl.edu

Grants: F30 NS057926-01 (Agency:United States NINDS) ; R01 MH71920-06 (Agency:United States NIMH) ; R01 NS48013 (Agency:United States NINDS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (J Neurosci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jun; vol 28 (issue 26) : pp 6549-56

Dates: Created 2008/06/26; Completed 2008/08/05;

PMID: 18579728, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Attention - physiology
Brain Mapping
Cerebrovascular Circulation - physiology
Cognition - physiology
Contrast Sensitivity - physiology
Eye Movements - physiology
Female
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Frontal Lobe - anatomy & histology; physiology

Frontal Lobe - anatomy & histology; physiology
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Neural Inhibition - physiology
Neuropsychological Tests
Orientation - physiology
Photic Stimulation
Space Perception - physiology
Visual Cortex - physiology

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