Deficits in Selective Attention Following Bilateral Anterior Cingulotomy

Abstract

Positron emission tomographic (PET) studies of normal humans undergoing specific cognitive activation paradigms have identified a region of the anterior cingulate cortex as a component of an anterior, midline attentional system involved in high-level processing selection. However, deficits in attention have not been demonstrated in patients following bilateral anterior cingulotomy, a procedure that results in lesions of adjacent anterior cingulate cortex. Task paradigms used in PET studies that recruit the anterior cingulate cortex were applied to normal, control subjects and to a patient before and after cingulotomy to provide highly sensitive and functionally targeted reaction time measures of attentional performance. In contrast to unchanged performance in several neuropsychological measures, this patient demonstrated specific deficits in attention during the subacute postoperative period, which resolved spontaneously several months after surgery. Such impairment is consistent with the evolving view of the anterior cingulate's involvement in high-level processing selection. These data show the feasibility of using information from PET activation studies of normals in the design of novel chronometric tasks useful for probing abnormalities in specific cognitive operations associated with discrete cortical regions.

The Role of the Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex, Basolateral Amygdala, and Dorsal Hippocampus in Contextual Reinstatement of Cocaine Seeking in Rats

“…Additionally, the dmPFC exhibits neural activation in response to both cocaine-paired stimuli and cocaine priming injections (Brown et al, 1992;Neisewander et al, 2000;Ciccocioppo et al, 2001) and the functional integrity of this structure is necessary for cocaine-primed reinstatement of cocaine-seeking behavior (McFarland and Kalivas, 2001), unlike the BLA or DH (Figure 3b Kantak et al, 2002;Yun and Fields, 2003). Thus, among the three structures examined, the dmPFC is the most generalized in its involvement in cocaine-seeking behavior which is consistent with its theorized role in executive functions, including attentional processes and response selection (Janer and Pardo, 1991;Devinsky et al, 1995;Bolla et al, 1998). Specifically, the dmPFC is thought to modulate the salience and motivational significance of stimuli by regulating attention to the sensory input that enters the BLA and hippocampus (Kolb, 1984;Rosenkranz and Grace, 2001) and by mediating BLA input to the nucleus accumbens (Jackson and Moghaddam, 2001), respectively.…”

Social Pain and the Brain: Controversies, Questions, and Where to Go from Here

“…Whereas it is well known that dACC lesions consistently reduce pain unpleasantness (Foltz & White 1962, Johansen et al 2001) and various forms of negative affect (Tow & Whitty 1953, Whitty et al 1952, they show no consistent effects on conflict detection tasks (e.g., the Stroop task). The majority of these studies show no effect of dACC lesions on cognitive task performance (Ballantine et al 1977, Corkin et al 1979, Fellows & Farah 2005, Swick & Turken 2002, Vendrell et al 1995, although some show effects that resolve over time (Cohen et al 1999, Janer & Pardo 1991, and a few find impairments (Stuss et al 2001, Swick & Jovanovic 2002. Moreover, although dACC activation to physical pain is commonly observed across humans and animals (Apkarian et al 2005, Johansen et al 2001, some evidence suggests that the dACC response to conflict monitoring may be uniquely human, as monkeys do not show dACC activation in response to cognitive conflict (Emeric et al 2008, Ito et al 2003, Mansouri et al 2007, Nakamura et al 2005; see also Cole et al 2009).…”

Neuroimaging Studies of Attention: From Modulation of Sensory Processing to Top-Down Control

“…Visuospatial neglect (or "extinction"), which involves a disruption of spatial attention in the contralesional visual hemifield, may follow unilateral lesions at very different sites, including the parietal lobe, especially its inferior part and the temporoparietal junction (Vallar and Perani, 1987), regions of the frontal lobe (Heilman and Valenstein, 1972;Damasio et al, 1980), and the anterior cingulate cortex (Janer and Pardo, 1991). Lesions of prefrontal regions disrupt at least three types of interrelated attentional processes (Stuss and Knight, 2002): task switching, filtering out of irrelevant information, and gating sensory signals.…”