Department of Neurology and Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité, Berlin, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2010 Nov;20(11):2702-11. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhq015. Epub 2010 Feb 22.
Combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows study of how local brain stimulation may causally affect activity in remote brain regions. Here, we applied bursts of high- or low-intensity TMS over right posterior parietal cortex, during a task requiring sustained covert visuospatial attention to either the left or right hemifield, or in a neutral control condition, while recording blood oxygenation-level-dependent signal with a posterior MR surface coil. As expected, the active attention conditions activated components of the well-described "attention network," as compared with the neutral baseline. Also as expected, when comparing left minus right attention, or vice versa, contralateral occipital visual cortex was activated. The critical new finding was that the impact of high- minus low-intensity parietal TMS upon these visual regions depended on the currently attended side. High- minus low-intensity parietal TMS increased the difference between contralateral versus ipsilateral attention in right extrastriate visual cortex. A related albeit less pronounced pattern was found for left extrastriate visual cortex. Our results confirm that right human parietal cortex can exert attention-dependent influences on occipital visual cortex and provide a proof of concept for the use of concurrent TMS-fMRI in studying how remote influences can vary in a purely top-down manner with attentional demands.
经颅磁刺激 (TMS) 与功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 的同步应用,使得研究局部脑刺激如何对远距离脑区的活动产生因果影响成为可能。在此,我们在任务期间,对右顶后皮质进行了高或低强度的 TMS 脉冲刺激,该任务要求对左或右半视野进行持续的隐蔽视空间注意,或者在中性对照条件下,同时用后颅面线圈记录血氧水平依赖信号。如预期的那样,与中性基线相比,活跃的注意条件激活了描述良好的“注意网络”的组成部分。同样可以预期的是,当比较左减右注意或反之亦然时,对侧枕叶视觉皮层被激活。关键的新发现是,高-低强度顶叶 TMS 对这些视觉区域的影响取决于当前关注的一侧。高-低强度顶叶 TMS 增加了右外侧纹状视觉皮层中对侧与同侧注意之间的差异。对于左侧的外侧纹状视觉皮层,也发现了类似但不太明显的模式。我们的结果证实,人类右顶叶可以对枕叶视觉皮层施加注意力依赖的影响,并为使用同步 TMS-fMRI 研究远程影响如何以纯粹的自上而下的方式随注意力需求而变化提供了概念验证。