TY - JOUR
T1 - Top-down attention switches coupling between low-level and high-level areas of human visual cortex
AU - Al-Aidroos, Naseem
AU - Said, Christopher P.
AU - Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2012, National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2012/8/13
Y1 - 2012/8/13
N2 - Top-down attention is an essential cognitive ability, allowing our finite brains to process complex natural environments by prioritizing information relevant to our goals. Previous evidence suggests that top-down attention operates by modulating stimulus-evoked neural activity within visual areas specialized for processing goal-relevant information. We show that top-down attention also has a separate influence on the background coupling between visual areas: adopting different attentional goals resulted in specific patterns of noise correlations in the visual system, whereby intrinsic activity in the same set of low-level areas was shared with only those high-level areas relevant to the current goal. These changes occurred independently of evoked activity, persisted without visual stimulation, and predicted behavioral success in deploying attention better than the modulation of evoked activity. This attentional switching of background connectivity suggests that attention may help synchronize different levels of the visual processing hierarchy, forming state-dependent functional pathways in human visual cortex to prioritize goal-relevant information.
AB - Top-down attention is an essential cognitive ability, allowing our finite brains to process complex natural environments by prioritizing information relevant to our goals. Previous evidence suggests that top-down attention operates by modulating stimulus-evoked neural activity within visual areas specialized for processing goal-relevant information. We show that top-down attention also has a separate influence on the background coupling between visual areas: adopting different attentional goals resulted in specific patterns of noise correlations in the visual system, whereby intrinsic activity in the same set of low-level areas was shared with only those high-level areas relevant to the current goal. These changes occurred independently of evoked activity, persisted without visual stimulation, and predicted behavioral success in deploying attention better than the modulation of evoked activity. This attentional switching of background connectivity suggests that attention may help synchronize different levels of the visual processing hierarchy, forming state-dependent functional pathways in human visual cortex to prioritize goal-relevant information.
KW - Category selectivity
KW - Functional MRI
KW - Goal-directed attention
KW - Retinotopic occipital cortex
KW - Ventral temporal cortex
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1202095109
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1202095109
M3 - Article
C2 - 22908274
AN - SCOPUS:84871689874
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 109
SP - 14675
EP - 14680
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 36
ER -