Neuroimaging Studies of Attention: From Modulation of Sensory Processing to Top-Down Control

Neuroimaging studies of attention: from modulation of sensory processing to top-down control.

Inhibition Mediates Top-Down Control of Sensory Processing

In this issue of Neuron, Hamilton et al. (2013) stimulate identified inhibitory interneurons with optogenetics, revealing powerful control of the flow of sensory responses across cortical layers. During natural behavior, these influences may mediate the rapid adaptive abilities necessary for detection and perception of sensory signals in noisy environments.

Top-down modulation of attention by emotion

Due to their evolutionary salience, threatrelated stimuli, such as snakes, spiders, and angry faces constitute a special class of stimuli believed to capture attention in an involuntary, bottom-up manner. Most research in affective neuroscience has focused on unraveling neural pathways that support this “automatic” capture of attention by emotional stimuli (Vuilleumier and Driver, 2007). Howeve...

Attentional modulation of affective versus sensory processing: functional connectivity and a top-down biased activation theory of selective attention.

Top-down selective attention to the affective properties of taste stimuli increases activation to the taste stimuli in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and pregenual cingulate cortex (PGC), and selective attention to the intensity of the stimuli increases the activation in the insular taste cortex, but the origin of the top-down attentional biases is not known. Using psychophysiological interacti...

Top-down control of visual attention.

Top-down visual attention improves perception of selected stimuli and that improvement is reflected in the neural activity at many stages throughout the visual system. Recent studies of top-down attention have elaborated on the signatures of its effects within visual cortex and have begun identifying its causal basis. Evidence from these studies suggests that the correlates of spatial attention...