O'Connor Daniel H, Fukui Miki M, Pinsk Mark A, Kastner Sabine
Department of Psychology, Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2002 Nov;5(11):1203-9. doi: 10.1038/nn957.
Attentional mechanisms are important for selecting relevant information and filtering out irrelevant information from cluttered visual scenes. Selective attention has previously been shown to affect neural activity in both extrastriate and striate visual cortex. Here, evidence from functional brain imaging shows that attentional response modulation is not confined to cortical processing, but can occur as early as the thalamic level. We found that attention modulated neural activity in the human lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) in several ways: it enhanced neural responses to attended stimuli, attenuated responses to ignored stimuli and increased baseline activity in the absence of visual stimulation. The LGN, traditionally viewed as the gateway to visual cortex, may also serve as a 'gatekeeper' in controlling attentional response gain.
注意力机制对于从杂乱的视觉场景中选择相关信息并过滤掉无关信息非常重要。先前已经表明，选择性注意力会影响纹外视觉皮层和纹状视觉皮层的神经活动。在这里，功能性脑成像的证据表明，注意力反应调制并不局限于皮层处理，而是最早可以在丘脑水平发生。我们发现，注意力以多种方式调节人类外侧膝状体（LGN）的神经活动：它增强了对被关注刺激的神经反应，减弱了对被忽略刺激的反应，并在没有视觉刺激的情况下增加了基线活动。传统上被视为通向视觉皮层门户的LGN，在控制注意力反应增益方面也可能充当“守门人”。
