The ventral attention network: the mirror of the language network in the right brain hemisphere

Abstract

Resting‐state functional MRI (RfMRI) analyses have identified two anatomically separable fronto‐parietal attention networks in the human brain: a bilateral dorsal attention network and a right‐lateralised ventral attention network (VAN). The VAN has been implicated in visuospatial cognition and, thus, potentially in the unilateral spatial neglect associated with right hemisphere lesions. Its parietal, frontal and temporal endpoints are thought to be structurally supported by undefined white matter tracts. We investigated the white matter tract connecting the VAN. We used three approaches to study the structural anatomy of the VAN: (a) independent component analysis on RfMRI (50 subjects), defining the endpoints of the VAN, (b) tractography in the same 50 healthy volunteers, with regions of interest defined by the MNI coordinates of cortical areas involved in the VAN used in a seed‐based approach and (c) dissection, by Klingler’s method, of 20 right hemispheres, for ex vivo studies of the fibre tracts connecting VAN endpoints. The VAN includes the temporoparietal junction and the ventral frontal cortex. The endpoints of the superior longitudinal fasciculus in its third portion (SLF III) and the arcuate fasciculus (AF) overlap with the VAN endpoints. The SLF III connects the supramarginal gyrus to the ventral portion of the precentral gyrus and the pars opercularis. The AF connects the middle and inferior temporal gyrus and the middle and inferior frontal gyrus. We reconstructed the structural connectivity of the VAN and considered it in the context if the pathophysiology of unilateral neglect and right hemisphere awake brain surgery.

Sex differences in neural responses to reward and the influences of individual reward and punishment sensitivity

“…Women showed regional responses to wins and larger wins in negative correlation with SP. These areas include the right middle frontal gyrus and anterior insula, each part of the ventral attention and salience networks [ 67 , 68 ]. In contrast, these regional responses were not correlated with SP scores in men and the responses of these same regions to losses did not correlate significantly with SP scores in women.…”

Post mortem mapping of connectional anatomy for the validation of diffusion MRI

“…In most cases, however, the results of Klingler’s dissection have been compared to tractography results from in vivo dMRI scans of a different set of subjects (Lawes et al, 2008; Martino et al, 2011; Martino et al, 2013; Goryainov et al, 2017; Latini et al, 2017; Maffei et al, 2018; Briggs et al, 2019,2020,2021; Flores-Justa et al, 2019; Bernard et al, 2020; Li et al, 2020; Shinohara et al, 2020; Egemen et al, 2021; Weiller et al, 2021). In those cases, only qualitative comparisons between tractography and dissection have been possible.…”

Attention Networks and the Intrinsic Network Structure of the Human Brain

“…The label ventral attention network has also been used to describe a leftlateralized network whose implicated brain regions are more suggestive of an involvement in language (Ji et al, 2019;Power et al, 2011). The ventral attention network could represent a right-lateralized version of the language network (Bernard et al, 2020) but neither we nor others (Ji et al, 2019) have detected a similar right lateralized version of the language network. We decided to follow recent suggestions and use the anatomical label midcingulo-insular network (Uddin et al, 2019) for three network components that correspond closely to the cingulo-opercular network in the Cole-Anticevic and Power-partition and the ventral attention and salience network in the Yeo-partition.…”