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Introduction. One of the most used paradigms in the study of attention is the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). The identical pairs version (CPT-IP) has been widely used to evaluate attention deficits in developmental, neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, the specific locations and the relative distribution of brain activation in networks identified with functional imaging, varies significantly with differences in task design. Aim. To design a task to evaluate sustained attention using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and thus to provide data for research concerned with the role of these functions. Subjects and methods. Forty right-handed, healthy students (50% women; age range: 18-25 years) were recruited. A CPT-IP implemented as a block design was used to assess sustained attention during the fMRI session. Results. The behavioural results from the CPT-IP task showed a good performance in all subjects, higher than 80% of hits. fMRI results showed that the used CPT-IP task activates a network of frontal, parietal and occipital areas, and that these are related to executive and attentional functions. Conclusions. In relation to the use of the CPT to study of attention and working memory, this task provides normative data in healthy adults, and it could be useful to evaluate disorders which have attentional and working memory deficits.

One problem of fMRI images is that they include some noise coming from many other sources like the heart beat, breathing and head motion artifacts. All these sources degrade the data and can cause wrong results in the statistical analysis. In order to reduce as much as possible the amount of noise and to improve signal detection, the fMRI data is spatially smoothed prior to the analysis. The most common and standardized method to do this task is by using a Gaussian filter. The principal problem of this method is that some regions may be under-smoothed, while others may be over-smoothed. This is caused by the fact that the extent of smoothing is chosen independently of the data and is assumed to be equal across the image. To avoid these problems, we suggest in our work to use an adaptive Wiener filter which smooths the images adaptively, performing a little smoothing where variance is large and more smoothing where the variance is small. In general, the results that we obtained with the adaptive filter are better than those obtained with the Gaussian kernel. In this paper we compare the effects of the smoothing with a Gaussian kernel and with an adaptive Wiener filter, in order to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach.

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