Data of ERPs and spectral alpha power when attention is engaged on visual or verbal/auditory imagery.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Villena-Gonzalez M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4816911 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:The deployment of neural alpha (8-12 Hz) lateralization in service of spatial attention is well-established: Alpha power increases in the cortical hemisphere ipsilateral to the attended hemifield, and decreases in the contralateral hemisphere, respectively. Much less is known about humans' ability to deploy such alpha lateralization in time, and to thus exploit alpha power as a spatio-temporal filter. Here we show that spatially lateralized alpha power does signify - beyond the direction of spatial attention - the distribution of attention in time and thereby qualifies as a spatio-temporal attentional filter. Participants (N = 20) selectively listened to spoken numbers presented on one side (left vs right), while competing numbers were presented on the other side. Key to our hypothesis, temporal foreknowledge was manipulated via a visual cue, which was either instructive and indicated the to-be-probed number position (70% valid) or neutral. Temporal foreknowledge did guide participants' attention, as they recognized numbers from the to-be-attended side more accurately following valid cues. In the magnetoencephalogram (MEG), spatial attention to the left versus right side induced lateralization of alpha power in all temporal cueing conditions. Modulation of alpha lateralization at the 0.8 Hz presentation rate of spoken numbers was stronger following instructive compared to neutral temporal cues. Critically, we found stronger modulation of lateralized alpha power specifically at the onsets of temporally cued numbers. These results suggest that the precisely timed hemispheric lateralization of alpha power qualifies as a spatio-temporal attentional filter mechanism susceptible to top-down behavioural goals.
| S-EPMC7903158 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundRecent neuroimaging studies have revealed that putatively unimodal regions of visual cortex can be activated during auditory tasks in sighted as well as in blind subjects. However, the task determinants and functional significance of auditory occipital activations (AOAs) remains unclear.Methodology/principal findingsWe examined AOAs in an intermodal selective attention task to distinguish whether they were stimulus-bound or recruited by higher-level cognitive operations associated with auditory attention. Cortical surface mapping showed that auditory occipital activations were localized to retinotopic visual cortex subserving the far peripheral visual field. AOAs depended strictly on the sustained engagement of auditory attention and were enhanced in more difficult listening conditions. In contrast, unattended sounds produced no AOAs regardless of their intensity, spatial location, or frequency.Conclusions/significanceAuditory attention, but not passive exposure to sounds, routinely activated peripheral regions of visual cortex when subjects attended to sound sources outside the visual field. Functional connections between auditory cortex and visual cortex subserving the peripheral visual field appear to underlie the generation of AOAs, which may reflect the priming of visual regions to process soon-to-appear objects associated with unseen sound sources.
| S-EPMC2644787 | biostudies-literature
Project description:An auditory augmenting/reducing ERP paradigm recorded for 5 intensity tones with emotional visual stimulation was used, for the first time, to test predictions derived from the revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (rRST) of personality with respect to two major factors: behavioral inhibition system (BIS), fight/flight/freeze system (FFFS). Higher BIS and FFFS scores were negatively correlated with N1/P2 slopes at central sites (C3, Cz, C4). Conditional process analysis revealed that the BIS was a mediator of the association between the N1/P2 slope and the FFFS scores. An analysis of covariance showed that lower BIS scorers exhibited larger N1/P2 amplitudes across all tone intensities while watching negative, positive and neutral pictures. Additionally, lower FFFS scorers compared to higher FFFS scorers disclosed larger N1/P2 amplitudes to the highest tone intensities and these differences were even more pronounced while watching positive emotional pictures. Findings were explained assuming the operation of two different, but related processes: transmarginal inhibition for the BIS; the attention/emotional gating mechanism regulating cortical sensory input for the FFFS trait. These findings appear consistent with predictions derived from the rRST, which traced fear and anxiety to separate but interacting neurobehavioural systems.
| S-EPMC5292688 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The current experiment examined changes in visual selective attention in young children, older children, young adults, and older adults while participants were instructed to ignore auditory and visual distractors. The aims of the study were to: (a) determine if the Perceptual Load Hypothesis (PLH) (distraction greater under low perceptual load) could predict which irrelevant stimuli would disrupt visual selective attention, and (b) if auditory to visual shifts found in modality dominance research could be extended to selective attention tasks. Overall, distractibility decreased with age, with incompatible distractors having larger costs in young and older children than adults. In regard to accuracy, visual distractibility did not differ across age nor load, whereas, auditory interference was more pronounced early in development and correlated with age. Auditory and visual distractors also slowed down responses in young and older children more than adults. Finally, the PLH did not predict performance. Rather, children often showed the opposite pattern, with visual distractors having a greater cost in the high load condition (older children) and auditory distractors having a greater cost in the high load condition (young children). These findings are consistent with research examining the development of modality dominance and shed light on changes in multisensory processing and selective attention across the lifespan.
| S-EPMC6304370 | biostudies-other
Project description:Tasks that require tracking visual information reveal the severe limitations of our capacity to attend to multiple objects that vary in time and space. Although these limitations have been extensively characterized in the visual domain, very little is known about tracking information in other sensory domains. Does tracking auditory information exhibit characteristics similar to those of tracking visual information, and to what extent do these two tracking tasks draw on the same attention resources? We addressed these questions by asking participants to perform either single or dual tracking tasks from the same (visual-visual) or different (visual-auditory) perceptual modalities, with the difficulty of the tracking tasks being manipulated across trials. The results revealed that performing two concurrent tracking tasks, whether they were in the same or different modalities, affected tracking performance as compared to performing each task alone (concurrence costs). Moreover, increasing task difficulty also led to increased costs in both the single-task and dual-task conditions (load-dependent costs). The comparison of concurrence costs between visual-visual and visual-auditory dual-task performance revealed slightly greater interference when two visual tracking tasks were paired. Interestingly, however, increasing task difficulty led to equivalent costs for visual-visual and visual-auditory pairings. We concluded that visual and auditory tracking draw largely, though not exclusively, on common central attentional resources.
| S-EPMC6061001 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The primary objective of this study was to determine whether children with localized ependymoma experience a decline in verbal or visual-auditory learning after conformal radiation therapy (CRT). The secondary objective was to investigate the impact of age and select clinical factors on learning before and after treatment.Learning in a sample of 71 patients with localized ependymoma was assessed with the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT-C) and the Visual-Auditory Learning Test (VAL). Learning measures were administered before CRT, at 6 months, and then yearly for a total of 5 years.There was no significant decline on measures of verbal or visual-auditory learning after CRT; however, younger age, more surgeries, and cerebrospinal fluid shunting did predict lower scores at baseline. There were significant longitudinal effects (improved learning scores after treatment) among older children on the CVLT-C and children that did not receive pre-CRT chemotherapy on the VAL.There was no evidence of global decline in learning after CRT in children with localized ependymoma. Several important implications from the findings include the following: (1) identification of and differentiation among variables with transient vs. long-term effects on learning, (2) demonstration that children treated with chemotherapy before CRT had greater risk of adverse visual-auditory learning performance, and (3) establishment of baseline and serial assessment as critical in ascertaining necessary sensitivity and specificity for the detection of modest effects.
| S-EPMC3037814 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Visuo-motor adaptation with optical prisms that displace the visual scene (prism adaptation, PA) has been widely used to study visuo-motor plasticity in healthy individuals and to decrease the lateralized bias of brain-damaged patients suffering from spatial neglect. Several factors may influence PA aftereffects, such as the degree of optical deviation (generally measured in dioptres of wedge prisms) or the direction of the prismatic shift (leftward vs. rightward). However, the mechanisms through which aftereffects of adaptation in healthy individuals and in neglect affect performance in tasks probing spatial cognition remain controversial. For example, some studies have reported positive effects of PA on auditory neglect, while other studies failed to obtain any changes of performance even in the visual modality. We here tested a new adaptation method in virtual reality to evaluate how sensory parameters influence PA aftereffects. Visual vs. auditory-verbal feedback of optical deviations were contrasted to assess whether rightward deviations influence manual and perceptual judgments in healthy individuals. Our results revealed that altered visual, but not altered auditory-verbal feedback induces aftereffects following adaptation to virtual prisms after 30-degrees of deviation. These findings refine current models of the mechanisms underlying the cognitive effects of virtual PA in emphasizing the importance of visual vs. auditory-verbal feedback during the adaptation phase on visuospatial judgments. Our study also specifies parameters which influence virtual PA and its aftereffect, such as the sensory modality used for the feedback.
| S-EPMC8575682 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Previous studies have demonstrated that the otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) measured during behavioral tasks can have different magnitudes when subjects are attending selectively or not attending. The implication is that the cognitive and perceptual demands of a task can affect the first neural stage of auditory processing-the sensory receptors themselves. However, the directions of the reported attentional effects have been inconsistent, the magnitudes of the observed differences typically have been small, and comparisons across studies have been made difficult by significant procedural differences. In this study, a nonlinear version of the stimulus-frequency OAE (SFOAE), called the nSFOAE, was used to measure cochlear responses from human subjects while they simultaneously performed behavioral tasks requiring selective auditory attention (dichotic or diotic listening), selective visual attention, or relative inattention. Within subjects, the differences in nSFOAE magnitude between inattention and attention conditions were about 2-3 dB for both auditory and visual modalities, and the effect sizes for the differences typically were large for both nSFOAE magnitude and phase. These results reveal that the cochlear efferent reflex is differentially active during selective attention and inattention, for both auditory and visual tasks, although they do not reveal how attention is improved when efferent activity is greater.
| S-EPMC4441704 | biostudies-other
Project description:The present study was designed to directly test the hypothesis that suppression of activations to task-irrelevant sounds contributes to the attention-related modulations of auditory cortex (AC) activations observed in previous fMRI studies. Subjects selectively attended to auditory (broadband noise bursts with pitch) or visual (Gabor gratings) asynchronous fast-rate stimulus streams concurrently presented to left-ear, right-ear, above-fixation, or below-fixation. Auditory and visual task difficulty was parametrically manipulated in three levels. Behavioral data obtained during fMRI indicated that subjects achieved acceptable performance levels in all tasks and that the task-difficulty manipulation was effective. Consistent with previous studies, AC activations strongly depended on the direction of attention. AC activations to sounds were higher during auditory than during visual tasks and AC activations were higher in the hemisphere contralateral to the attended ear. However, the effects of task difficulty on AC activations were weak or non-existent. In particular, increasing task difficulty was not associated with a systematic decrease of AC activations in areas that were modulated by attention. These results suggest that suppression of AC activations to task-irrelevant sounds is likely to be small or negligible as compared with the strong activation enhancements observed in fMRI during active auditory tasks.
| S-EPMC3134945 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Both visual and auditory spatial selective attention result in lateralized alpha (8-14 Hz) oscillatory power in parietal cortex: alpha increases in the hemisphere ipsilateral to attentional focus. Brain stimulation studies suggest a causal relationship between parietal alpha and suppression of the representation of contralateral visual space. However, there is no evidence that parietal alpha controls auditory spatial attention. Here, we performed high definition transcranial alternating current stimulation (HD-tACS) on human subjects performing an auditory task in which they directed attention based on either spatial or nonspatial features. Alpha (10 Hz) but not theta (6 Hz) HD-tACS of right parietal cortex interfered with attending left but not right auditory space. Parietal stimulation had no effect for nonspatial auditory attention. Moreover, performance in post-stimulation trials returned rapidly to baseline. These results demonstrate a causal, frequency-, hemispheric-, and task-specific effect of parietal alpha brain stimulation on top-down control of auditory spatial attention.
| S-EPMC6904218 | biostudies-literature