Karimi-Rouzbahani Hamid, Vahab Ehsan, Ebrahimpour Reza, Menhaj Mohammad Bagher
Department of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran; Perception in Action Research Centre & Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia; ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia.
Department of Computer and Information and Technology Engineering, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran.
Behav Brain Res. 2019 Apr 19;362:224-239. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2019.01.025. Epub 2019 Jan 14.
To recognize a target object, the brain implements strategies which involve a combination of externally sensory-driven and internally task-driven mechanisms. While several studies have suggested a role for frontal brain areas in enhancing task-related representations in visual cortices, especially in the lateral-occipital cortex, they have remained silent about the type of information transferred to visual areas. However, the recently developed methods of representational connectivity analysis, allowed us to track the movement of different types of information in the brain. Accordingly, we designed an EEG object detection experiment and inspected the spatiotemporal dynamics of category- and target-related information across the brain. Results showed that the prefrontal area initiated the processing of target-related information. This information was then transferred to posterior brain areas during stimulus presentation probably to facilitate object detection and to direct the decision-making procedure. We also observed that, as compared to category-related information, the target-related information could predict the behavioral performance more accurately, suggesting the dominant representation of internal compared to external information in brain signals. These results provided new evidence about the role of prefrontal cortices in the processing of task-related information in the brain during object detection.
为了识别目标物体，大脑会实施一些策略，这些策略涉及外部感官驱动和内部任务驱动机制的结合。虽然多项研究表明额叶脑区在增强视觉皮层（尤其是枕外侧皮层）中与任务相关的表征方面发挥了作用，但它们对于传递到视觉区域的信息类型却未作说明。然而，最近开发的表征连接性分析方法使我们能够追踪大脑中不同类型信息的流动。因此，我们设计了一项脑电图物体检测实验，并检查了大脑中与类别和目标相关信息的时空动态。结果表明，前额叶区域启动了与目标相关信息的处理。在刺激呈现期间，该信息随后被传递到大脑后部区域，可能是为了促进物体检测并指导决策过程。我们还观察到，与类别相关信息相比，目标相关信息能够更准确地预测行为表现，这表明在大脑信号中内部信息比外部信息占主导地位。这些结果为前额叶皮层在物体检测过程中处理大脑中与任务相关信息的作用提供了新的证据。
