Khalaf Aya, Lopez Erick, Li Jian, Horn Andreas, Edlow Brian L, Blumenfeld Hal
Department of Neurology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Neurology, Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, USA.
Neuroimage. 2025 May 15;312:121224. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121224. Epub 2025 Apr 16.
Subcortical arousal systems are known to play a key role in controlling sustained changes in attention and conscious awareness. Recent studies indicate that these systems have a major influence on short-term dynamic modulation of visual attention, but their role across sensory modalities is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated shared subcortical arousal systems across sensory modalities during transient changes in attention using block and event-related fMRI paradigms. We analyzed massive publicly available fMRI datasets collected while 1561 participants performed visual, auditory, tactile, and taste perception tasks. Our analyses revealed a shared circuit of subcortical arousal systems exhibiting early transient increases in activity in midbrain reticular formation and central thalamus across perceptual modalities, as well as less consistent increases in pons, hypothalamus, basal forebrain, and basal ganglia. Identifying these networks is critical for understanding mechanisms of normal attention and consciousness and may help facilitate subcortical targeting for therapeutic neuromodulation.
已知皮层下觉醒系统在控制注意力和意识的持续变化中起关键作用。最近的研究表明，这些系统对视觉注意力的短期动态调节有重大影响，但它们在各种感觉模态中的作用尚未完全明确。在本研究中，我们使用组块和事件相关功能磁共振成像范式，调查了注意力瞬态变化期间跨感觉模态的共享皮层下觉醒系统。我们分析了1561名参与者在执行视觉、听觉、触觉和味觉感知任务时收集的大量公开可用功能磁共振成像数据集。我们的分析揭示了一个皮层下觉醒系统的共享回路，该回路在中脑网状结构和丘脑中央呈现出跨感知模态的早期活动瞬态增加，以及脑桥、下丘脑、基底前脑和基底神经节中不太一致的增加。识别这些网络对于理解正常注意力和意识机制至关重要，可能有助于促进治疗性神经调节的皮层下靶点定位。
