Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci. 2011 May 4;31(18):6620-6. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5864-10.2011.
We all appreciate that some of our friends and colleagues are more distractible than others. This variability can be captured by pencil and paper questionnaires in which individuals report such cognitive failures in their everyday life. Surprisingly, these self-report measures have high heritability, leading to the hypothesis that distractibility might have a basis in brain structure. In a large sample of healthy adults, we demonstrated that a simple self-report measure of everyday distractibility accurately predicted gray matter volume in a remarkably focal region of left superior parietal cortex. This region must play a causal role in reducing distractibility, because we found that disrupting its function with transcranial magnetic stimulation increased susceptibility to distraction. Finally, we showed that the self-report measure of distractibility reliably predicted our laboratory-based measure of attentional capture. Our findings distinguish a critical mechanism in the human brain causally involved in avoiding distractibility, which, importantly, bridges self-report judgments of cognitive failures in everyday life and a commonly used laboratory measure of distractibility to the structure of the human brain.
我们都知道，我们的一些朋友和同事比其他人更容易分心。这种可变性可以通过纸笔问卷来捕捉，个体在日常生活中报告这些认知失败。令人惊讶的是，这些自我报告的测量具有很高的遗传性，这导致了分心可能有大脑结构基础的假设。在一个健康成年人的大样本中，我们证明了一种简单的日常分心自我报告测量方法可以准确预测左顶叶上皮质一个非常集中的区域的灰质体积。这个区域在降低分心方面一定起着因果作用，因为我们发现用经颅磁刺激来干扰其功能会增加分心的易感性。最后，我们发现分心的自我报告测量可以可靠地预测我们基于实验室的注意力捕获测量。我们的研究结果区分了人类大脑中一个关键的机制，该机制在避免分心方面起着因果作用，重要的是，它将日常生活中认知失败的自我报告判断与分心的常用实验室测量方法以及人类大脑的结构联系起来。
