Ptak Radek, Pedrazzini Elena
Laboratory of Cognitive Neurorehabilitation, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva 1206, Switzerland.
Division of Neurorehabilitation, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva 1206, Switzerland.
Cereb Cortex. 2021 Jul 29;31(9):4245-4258. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab082.
The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and insula both play a key role for the processing of relevant stimuli. However, while both have been conceived as neural "switches" that detect salient events and redirect the focus of attention, it remains unclear how these brain regions interact to achieve this behavioral goal. Here, we tested human participants with focal left-hemispheric or right-hemispheric lesions in a spatial cuing task that requires participants to react to lateralized stimuli preceded by a distracter that shares or does not share a relevant feature with the target. Using machine learning to identify significant lesion-behavior relationships, we found that rTPJ damage produces distinctive, pathologically increased attentional capture, but only by relevant distracters. Functional connectivity analyses revealed that the degree of capture is positively associated with a functional connection between insula and rTPJ, together with functional isolation of the rTPJ from right dorsal prefrontal cortex (dPFC). These findings suggest a mechanistic model where the insula-rTPJ connection constitutes a crucial functional unit that breaks attentional focus upon detection of behaviorally relevant events, while the dPFC appears to attune this activity.
右侧颞顶联合区（rTPJ）和脑岛在相关刺激的处理过程中均发挥关键作用。然而，尽管二者都被视为检测显著事件并重新引导注意力焦点的神经“开关”，但这些脑区如何相互作用以实现这一行为目标仍不清楚。在此，我们在一项空间线索任务中对患有左侧或右侧半球局灶性损伤的人类参与者进行了测试，该任务要求参与者对在一个与目标共享或不共享相关特征的干扰物之后出现的侧向化刺激做出反应。通过使用机器学习来识别显著的损伤 - 行为关系，我们发现rTPJ损伤会产生独特的、病理性增加的注意力捕获，但仅由相关干扰物引起。功能连接分析表明，捕获程度与脑岛和rTPJ之间的功能连接呈正相关，同时rTPJ与右侧背侧前额叶皮层（dPFC）功能隔离。这些发现提示了一种机制模型，其中脑岛 - rTPJ连接构成了一个关键的功能单元，在检测到行为相关事件时打破注意力焦点，而dPFC似乎调节这种活动。
