Duan Keyi, Xie Songyun, Zhang Xin, Xie Xinzhou, Cui Yujie, Liu Ruizhen, Xu Jian
Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China.
Brain Sci. 2023 Jan 31;13(2):247. doi: 10.3390/brainsci13020247.
The attentional processes are conceptualized as a system of anatomical brain areas involving three specialized networks of alerting, orienting and executive control, each of which has been proven to have a relation with specified time-frequency oscillations through electrophysiological techniques. Nevertheless, at present, it is still unclear how the idea of these three independent attention networks is reflected in the specific short-time topology propagation of the brain, assembled with complexity and precision. In this study, we investigated the temporal patterns of dynamic information flow in each attention network via electroencephalograph (EEG)-based analysis. A modified version of the attention network test (ANT) with an EEG recording was adopted to probe the dynamic topology propagation in the three attention networks. First, the event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was used to extract sub-stage networks corresponding to the role of each attention network. Then, the dynamic network model of each attention network was constructed by post hoc test between conditions followed by the short-time-windows fitting model and brain network construction. We found that the alerting involved long-range interaction among the prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex of brain. The orienting elicited more sparse information flow after the target onset in the frequency band 1-30 Hz, and the executive control contained complex top-down control originating from the frontal cortex of the brain. Moreover, the switch of the activated regions in the associated time courses was elicited in attention networks contributing to diverse processing stages, which further extends our knowledge of the mechanism of attention networks.
注意力过程被概念化为一个涉及警觉、定向和执行控制三个专门网络的大脑解剖区域系统，通过电生理技术已证明每个网络都与特定的时频振荡有关。然而，目前仍不清楚这三个独立注意力网络的概念是如何在大脑特定的短时拓扑传播中体现的，这种传播既复杂又精确。在本研究中，我们通过基于脑电图（EEG）的分析来研究每个注意力网络中动态信息流的时间模式。采用一种带有EEG记录的注意力网络测试（ANT）的修改版本来探究三个注意力网络中的动态拓扑传播。首先，使用事件相关电位（ERP）分析来提取与每个注意力网络作用相对应的子阶段网络。然后，通过条件间的事后检验、短时窗口拟合模型和脑网络构建来构建每个注意力网络的动态网络模型。我们发现警觉涉及大脑前额叶皮层和后皮层之间的长程相互作用。定向在目标出现后在1 - 30Hz频段引发更稀疏的信息流，执行控制包含源自大脑额叶皮层的复杂自上而下的控制。此外，在有助于不同处理阶段的注意力网络中引发了相关时间进程中激活区域的切换，这进一步扩展了我们对注意力网络机制的认识。
