Department of Psychology, Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior, and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
J Neurosci. 2010 Jan 6;30(1):148-60. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3862-09.2010.
Theories of spatial attentional control have been largely based upon studies of patients suffering from visuospatial neglect, resulting from circumscribed lesions of frontal and posterior parietal cortex. In the intact brain, the control of spatial attention has been related to a distributed frontoparietal attention network. Little is known about the nature of the control mechanisms exerted by this network. Here, we used a novel region-of-interest approach to relate activations of the attention network to recently described topographic areas in frontal cortex [frontal eye field (FEF), PreCC/IFS (precentral cortex/inferior frontal sulcus)] and parietal cortex [intraparietal sulcus areas (IPS1-IPS5) and an area in the superior parietal lobule (SPL1)] to examine their spatial attention signals. We found that attention signals in most topographic areas were spatially specific, with stronger responses when attention was directed to the contralateral than to the ipsilateral visual field. Importantly, two hemispheric asymmetries were found. First, a region in only right, but not left SPL1 carried spatial attention signals. Second, left FEF and left posterior parietal cortex (IPS1/2) generated stronger contralateral biasing signals than their counterparts in the right hemisphere. These findings are the first to characterize spatial attention signals in topographic frontal and parietal cortex and provide a neural basis in support of an interhemispheric competition account of spatial attentional control.
空间注意控制理论主要基于对因额叶和顶后皮质局灶性损伤而导致的视空间忽视患者的研究。在完整的大脑中，空间注意的控制与分布式额顶注意网络有关。对于该网络施加的控制机制的性质，我们知之甚少。在这里，我们使用一种新颖的感兴趣区域方法，将注意网络的激活与最近在额叶[额眼区（FEF）、前中央皮层/额下回（precentral cortex/inferior frontal sulcus）]和顶叶[顶内沟区（IPS1-IPS5）和上顶叶区（SPL1）]中描述的拓扑区域相关联，以检查它们的空间注意信号。我们发现，大多数拓扑区域的注意信号具有空间特异性，当注意力指向对侧视野时，反应更强。重要的是，发现了两个半球不对称。首先，只有右侧 SPL1 的一个区域携带空间注意信号，而左侧 SPL1 则没有。其次，左额前皮质（FEF）和左顶后皮质（IPS1/2）产生的对侧偏向信号比右侧对应区域更强。这些发现是首次对拓扑额顶叶皮质中的空间注意信号进行特征描述，并为支持空间注意控制的半球间竞争理论提供了神经基础。
