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Review
. 2003 May 15;23(10):3990-8.
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.23-10-03990.2003.

Neuroimaging studies of attention: from modulation of sensory processing to top-down control

Luiz Pessoa  1 , Sabine Kastner, Leslie G Ungerleider
Affiliations
Review

Neuroimaging studies of attention: from modulation of sensory processing to top-down control

Luiz Pessoa et al. J Neurosci. .
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Attentional modulation of competitive interactions. A, B, Responses of a typical V4 cell to an effective stimulus (green) alone or response to paired effective and ineffective (red) stimuli in the receptive field (RF). A, Attention outside the RF. The addition of an ineffective stimulus within the RF reduces the response of the cell. B, Attention inside the RF to the effective stimulus. Attention to the effective stimulus increases the response toward the one evoked by the effective stimulus alone, suggesting that attention effectively filters our distracting information. Dotted regions indicate the RF of the cell. Cone indicates location of attention. Figure courtesy of J. Reynolds and R. Desimone. C, Time series of fMRI signals in human V4. Pink shading indicates unattended condition; blue shading indicates attended condition. During the unattended presentations, sequentially presented stimuli evoked stronger activity than simultaneously presented stimuli, indicating sensory suppressive interaction. In the attended condition, signals to simultaneously presented stimuli increased to a larger extent than to sequentially presented stimuli. SEQ, Sequentially presented stimuli; SIM, simultaneously presented stimuli. Adapted from Kastner et al. (1998).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Fate of unattended stimuli. A, Responses evoked by task-irrelevant, unattended peripheral motion (adapted from Rees et al.,1997). During a low-load linguistic task (determining whether words were lowercase or uppercase), strong responses were observed in area MT (red line). During a high-load condition (determining whether words contained two syllables), such responses were eliminated. B, C, Responses evoked by fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Estimated responses for the right amygdala (B) and right fusiform gyrus (C) regions of interest as a function of attention and valence. The expression of a valence effect (e.g., responses to fearful faces greater than responses to neutralfaces) was observed only when the faces were attended. For unattended faces, no difference in the responses to different expressions was observed; in fact, responses were not significantly greater than zero. The results suggest that attention is required for the processing of stimulus valence. FA, Fearful attended; FU, fearful unattended; HA, happy attended; HU, happy unattended; NA, neutral attended; NU, neutral unattended. Adapted from Pessoa et al. (2002).
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