title: Top-down controlled and bottom-up triggered orienting of auditory attention to pitch activate overlapping brain networks.
abstract: A number of previous studies have suggested segregated networks of brain areas for top-down controlled and bottom-up triggered orienting of visual attention. However, the corresponding networks involved in auditory attention remain less studied. Our participants attended selectively to a tone stream with either a lower pitch or higher pitch in order to respond to infrequent changes in duration of attended tones. The participants were also required to shift their attention from one stream to the other when guided by a visual arrow cue. In addition to these top-down controlled cued attention shifts, infrequent task-irrelevant louder tones occurred in both streams to trigger attention in a bottom-up manner. Both cued shifts and louder tones were associated with enhanced activity in the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus, temporo-parietal junction, superior parietal lobule, inferior and middle frontal gyri, frontal eye field, supplementary motor area, and anterior cingulate gyrus. Thus, the present findings suggest that in the auditory modality, unlike in vision, top-down controlled and bottom-up triggered attention activate largely the same cortical networks. Comparison of the present results with our previous results from a similar experiment on spatial auditory attention suggests that fronto-parietal networks of attention to location or pitch overlap substantially. However, the auditory areas in the anterior superior temporal cortex might have a more important role in attention to the pitch than location of sounds. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Prediction and Attention.
authors.affiliation: Division of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto University, Finland; Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland; Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Sweden. Electronic address: kimmo.alho@helsinki.fi.
authors.forename: Kimmo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Alho
authors.affiliation: Division of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto University, Finland.
authors.forename: Juha
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Salmi
authors.affiliation: Division of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Sonja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Koistinen
authors.affiliation: Helsinki Medical Imaging Center, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland.
authors.forename: Oili
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Salonen
authors.affiliation: Division of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto University, Finland.
authors.forename: Teemu
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Rinne
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Auditory; Bottom-up triggered; Pitch; Top-down controlled; fMRI