Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Sep 4;109(36):14675-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202095109. Epub 2012 Aug 20.
Top-down attention is an essential cognitive ability, allowing our finite brains to process complex natural environments by prioritizing information relevant to our goals. Previous evidence suggests that top-down attention operates by modulating stimulus-evoked neural activity within visual areas specialized for processing goal-relevant information. We show that top-down attention also has a separate influence on the background coupling between visual areas: adopting different attentional goals resulted in specific patterns of noise correlations in the visual system, whereby intrinsic activity in the same set of low-level areas was shared with only those high-level areas relevant to the current goal. These changes occurred independently of evoked activity, persisted without visual stimulation, and predicted behavioral success in deploying attention better than the modulation of evoked activity. This attentional switching of background connectivity suggests that attention may help synchronize different levels of the visual processing hierarchy, forming state-dependent functional pathways in human visual cortex to prioritize goal-relevant information.
自上而下的注意力是一种基本的认知能力，使我们有限的大脑能够通过优先处理与目标相关的信息来处理复杂的自然环境。先前的证据表明，自上而下的注意力通过调节专门处理与目标相关信息的视觉区域中的刺激诱发神经活动来发挥作用。我们表明，自上而下的注意力对视觉区域之间的背景耦合也有单独的影响：采用不同的注意力目标会导致视觉系统中噪声相关性的特定模式，即同一组低级区域的内在活动仅与当前目标相关的那些高级区域共享。这些变化独立于诱发活动发生，在没有视觉刺激的情况下持续存在，并且比诱发活动的调制更能预测注意力的成功部署。这种背景连接的注意力切换表明，注意力可能有助于同步视觉处理层次结构的不同级别，在人类视觉皮层中形成与状态相关的功能途径，以优先处理与目标相关的信息。
