Brus Jeroen, Heng Joseph A, Beliaeva Valeriia, Gonzalez Pinto Fabian, Cassarà Antonino Mario, Neufeld Esra, Grueschow Marcus, Imbach Lukas, Polanía Rafael
Decision Neuroscience Lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Neuroscience Center Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Apr;8(4):743-757. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01820-z. Epub 2024 Feb 16.
Non-spatial attention is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that allows organisms to orient the focus of conscious awareness towards sensory information that is relevant to a behavioural goal while shifting it away from irrelevant stimuli. It has been suggested that attention is regulated by the ongoing phase of slow excitability fluctuations of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, a hypothesis that has been challenged with no consensus. Here we developed a behavioural and non-invasive stimulation paradigm aiming at modulating slow excitability fluctuations of the inferior frontal junction. Using this approach, we show that non-spatial attention can be selectively modulated as a function of the ongoing phase of exogenously modulated excitability states of this brain structure. These results demonstrate that non-spatial attention relies on ongoing prefrontal excitability states, which are probably regulated by slow oscillatory dynamics, that orchestrate goal-oriented behaviour.
非空间注意力是一种基本的认知机制，它使生物体能够将意识觉知的焦点导向与行为目标相关的感官信息，同时将其从无关刺激中转移出来。有人提出，注意力受前额叶皮质神经活动缓慢兴奋性波动的当前相位调节，这一假设受到了挑战，尚无定论。在这里，我们开发了一种行为和非侵入性刺激范式，旨在调节额下回交界处的缓慢兴奋性波动。使用这种方法，我们表明非空间注意力可以根据该脑区结构外源性调节的兴奋性状态的当前相位进行选择性调节。这些结果表明，非空间注意力依赖于前额叶的当前兴奋性状态，而这种状态可能受缓慢振荡动力学调节，从而协调目标导向行为。
