Functional dissociation of the inferior frontal junction from the dorsal attention network in top-down attentional control

Abstract

The posterior lateral prefrontal cortex - specifically, the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) - is thought to exert a key role in the control of attention. However, the precise nature of that role remains elusive. During the voluntary deployment and maintenance of visuospatial attention, the IFJ is typically co-activated with a core dorsal network consisting of the FEF and superior parietal cortex. During stimulus-driven attention, IFJ instead couples with a ventrolateral network, suggesting that IFJ plays a distinct role in attention from the dorsal network. Because IFJ rapidly switches activation patterns to accommodate conditions of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention (Asplund et al. 2010), we hypothesized that IFJ's primary role is to dynamically reconfigure attention rather than to maintain attention under steady-state conditions. This hypothesis predicts that in a goal-directed visuospatial cueing paradigm, IFJ would transiently deploy attention towards the cued location, whereas the dorsal attention network would maintain attentional weights during the delay between cue and target presentation. Here, we tested this hypothesis using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects were engaged in a Posner cueing task with variable cue-target delays. Both IFJ and dorsal network regions were involved in transient processes, but sustained activity was far more evident in the dorsal network than IFJ. These results support the account that IFJ primarily acts to shift attention while the dorsal network is the main locus for the maintenance of stable attentional states.

Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Working Memory: Change in Functional Connectivity Between the Dorsal Attention, Default Mode, and Fronto-Parietal Networks

“…The main finding of this study was that SD enhances the functional connectivity between DAN and DMN and that this change is significantly related to a decline in WM performance. From the perspective of the WM model, DAN should be the core brain network for processing and maintaining visuospatial sketchpad (Fairhall et al, 2009;Tamber-Rosenau et al, 2018). The main function of DAN is to provide top-down attention to the outside world and participate in the completion of exogenous tasks (Ptak and Schnider, 2010;Fornito et al, 2012).…”

Central attention is serial, but midlevel and peripheral attention are parallel—A hypothesis

“…Such processing benefits have been demonstrated extensively for locations in space, but also for perceptual objects and features. Attention deployed within sensory systems and the representations they generate is generally considered to be peripheral in nature; that is, perceptual attention is sustained locally in the relevant representations via biases in stimulus competition that favor the representation of attended stimuli (Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Serences & Yantis, 2006, 2007; Yantis, 2008), even though these peripheral biases are the result of sustained input from elsewhere in the brain (Kelley, Serences, Giesbrecht, & Yantis, 2008; Tamber-Rosenau, Asplund, & Marois, in revision; Yantis et al, 2002). …”

“…Mid-level biasing signals are temporally sustained in nature (Esterman et al, 2015; Kastner, Pinsk, De Weerd, Desimone, & Ungerleider, 1999; Offen, Gardner, Schluppeck, & Heeger, 2010; Tamber-Rosenau, Asplund, et al, in revision) because it is their sustained action that continually biases peripheral targets of attention (Yantis, 2008). Thus, if attentional biases can be simultaneously and independently exerted in parallel on multiple peripheral representations at the same time, then it follows that mid-level sources of attention must also be parallel in nature.…”

“…Synthesizing prior models (e.g., Baddeley, 1986; Dosenbach et al, 2008; Marois & Ivanoff, 2005; Salvucci & Taatgen, 2008; Serences & Yantis, 2006; Yantis, 2008) and current empirical results (Asplund et al, 2010; Tamber-Rosenau, Asplund, et al, in revision; Tamber-Rosenau et al, 2013; Tamber-Rosenau, Newton, et al, in revision), we have proposed a hierarchy of attentional control from central attentional/prefrontal control of task goals, through mid-level/FEF and IPS sources of attentional biasing signals, to peripheral sensory and working memory representations that are biased by mid-level inputs. We further propose that attention is parallel across both mid-level sources of control and peripheral perceptual and representational systems.…”

Role of Inferior Frontal Junction (IFJ) in the Control of Feature vs Spatial Attention

“…Bichot et al (2015) observe an increase in firing rates in neurons in VPA (the non-human primate analog of IFJ) when the attended stimulus was the primary target in a visual search task. IFJ is sometimes considered to be at the confluence of dorsal and ventral attention networks, dynamically switching its association between DAN and VAN during anticipatory attention versus stimulus selection processes, as has been shown by He et al, 2007 (who labeled it MFG), and others (Apslund et al, 2010;Tamber Rosenau et al, 2018). Whereas IFJ activation by target stimuli was expected, whether it is engaged in selecting the attended stimulus over the unattended stimulus within the same feature domain remains to be tested.…”