Fan Jin, McCandliss Bruce D, Fossella John, Flombaum Jonathan I, Posner Michael I
Laboratory of Neuroimaging, Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029, USA.
Neuroimage. 2005 Jun;26(2):471-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.02.004. Epub 2005 Mar 19.
Alerting, orienting, and executive control are widely thought to be relatively independent aspects of attention that are linked to separable brain regions. However, neuroimaging studies have yet to examine evidence for the anatomical separability of these three aspects of attention in the same subjects performing the same task. The attention network test (ANT) examines the effects of cues and targets within a single reaction time task to provide a means of exploring the efficiency of the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks involved in attention. It also provides an opportunity to examine the brain activity of these three networks as they operate in a single integrated task. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the brain areas involved in the three attention systems targeted by the ANT. The alerting contrast showed strong thalamic involvement and activation of anterior and posterior cortical sites. As expected, the orienting contrast activated parietal sites and frontal eye fields. The executive control network contrast showed activation of the anterior cingulate along with several other brain areas. With some exceptions, activation patterns of these three networks within this single task are consistent with previous fMRI studies that have been studied in separate tasks. Overall, the fMRI results suggest that the functional contrasts within this single task differentially activate three separable anatomical networks related to the components of attention.
警觉、定向和执行控制被广泛认为是注意力相对独立的方面，与不同的脑区相关联。然而，神经影像学研究尚未在执行相同任务的同一受试者中检验这三个注意力方面在解剖学上可分离的证据。注意力网络测试（ANT）在单一反应时间任务中检验线索和目标的作用，以提供一种探索参与注意力的警觉、定向和执行控制网络效率的方法。它还提供了一个机会来检查这三个网络在单一综合任务中运行时的大脑活动。我们使用事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来探索ANT所针对的三个注意力系统中涉及的脑区。警觉对比显示丘脑有强烈参与以及前后皮质位点的激活。正如预期的那样，定向对比激活了顶叶位点和额叶眼区。执行控制网络对比显示前扣带回以及其他几个脑区的激活。除了一些例外情况，这三个网络在这个单一任务中的激活模式与之前在单独任务中进行的fMRI研究一致。总体而言，fMRI结果表明，这个单一任务中的功能对比差异激活了与注意力成分相关的三个可分离的解剖学网络。
