title: Brain mechanisms associated with background monitoring of the environment for potentially significant sensory events.
abstract: Background monitoring is a necessary prerequisite to detect unexpected changes in the environment, while being involved in a primary task. Here, we used fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie adaptive goal-directed behavior in a cued task switching paradigm during real response conflict or, more generally, when expectations on the repetitive features of the environment were violated. Unexpected changes in sensory stimulus attributes in the currently unattended stimulus dimension thereby led to activations in a bilateral network comprising inferior lateral frontal, intraparietal, and posterior medial frontal brain regions, independent of whether these attributes elicited a factual response conflict or not. This fronto-parietal network may thus play an important role in adaptive responding to potentially significant events outside the current focus of attention.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Georg August University, Goettingen, Germany. ogruber@gwdg.de
authors.forename: Oliver
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Gruber
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Melcher
authors.forename: Esther K
authors.initials: EK
authors.lastname: Diekhof
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Karch
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Falkai
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Goschke
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult