title: Brain activity associated with selective attention, divided attention and distraction.
abstract: Top-down controlled selective or divided attention to sounds and visual objects, as well as bottom-up triggered attention to auditory and visual distractors, has been widely investigated. However, no study has systematically compared brain activations related to all these types of attention. To this end, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in participants performing a tone pitch or a foveal grating orientation discrimination task, or both, distracted by novel sounds not sharing frequencies with the tones or by extrafoveal visual textures. To force focusing of attention to tones or gratings, or both, task difficulty was kept constantly high with an adaptive staircase method. A whole brain analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed fronto-parietal attention networks for both selective auditory and visual attention. A subsequent conjunction analysis indicated partial overlaps of these networks. However, like some previous studies, the present results also suggest segregation of prefrontal areas involved in the control of auditory and visual attention. The ANOVA also suggested, and another conjunction analysis confirmed, an additional activity enhancement in the left middle frontal gyrus related to divided attention supporting the role of this area in top-down integration of dual task performance. Distractors expectedly disrupted task performance. However, contrary to our expectations, activations specifically related to the distractors were found only in the auditory and visual cortices. This suggests gating of the distractors from further processing perhaps due to strictly focused attention in the current demanding discrimination tasks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Espoo, Finland. Electronic address: emma.salo@helsinki.fi.
authors.forename: Emma
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salo
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Espoo, Finland.
authors.forename: Viljami
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Salmela
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Espoo, Finland; Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.
authors.forename: Juha
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Salmi
authors.affiliation: Helsinki Medical Imaging Centre, Helsinki University Hospital, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Jussi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Numminen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto Neuroimaging, Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Espoo, Finland.
authors.forename: Kimmo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Alho
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory; Divided attention; Novel distractors; Visual; fMRI