title: The human basal ganglia modulate frontal-posterior connectivity during attention shifting.
abstract: Current models of flexible cognitive control emphasize the role of the prefrontal cortex. This region has been shown to control attention by biasing information processing in favor of task-relevant representations. However, the prefrontal cortex does not act in isolation. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging combined with nonlinear dynamic causal modeling to demonstrate that the basal ganglia play a role in modulating the top-down influence of the prefrontal cortex on visual processing in humans. Specifically, our results reveal that connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and stimulus-specific visual association areas depends on activity in the ventral striatopallidum, elicited by salient events leading to shifts in attention. These data integrate disparate literatures on top-down control by the prefrontal cortex and selective gating by the basal ganglia and highlight the importance of the basal ganglia for high-level cognitive control.
authors.affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6500 HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. martine.vanschouwenburg@donders.ru.nl
authors.forename: Martine R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: van Schouwenburg
authors.forename: Hanneke E M
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: den Ouden
authors.forename: Roshan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cools
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003342:Corpus Striatum / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult