TY - JOUR
T1 - Modulation of anticipatory visuospatial attention in sustained and transient tasks
AU - Di Russo, Francesco
AU - Berchicci, Marika
AU - Bianco, Valentina
AU - Perri, Rinaldo L.
AU - Pitzalis, Sabrina
AU - Mussini, Elena
N1 - Funding Information:
This study has been supported by operating funds of the University of Rome Foro Italico and of the Santa Lucia Foundation of Rome .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - The anticipation of upcoming events is a key-feature of cognition. Previous investigations on anticipatory visuospatial attention mainly adopted transient and–more rarely–sustained tasks, whose main difference consists in the presence of transient or sustained cue stimuli and different involvement of top-down or bottom-up forms of attention. In particular, while top-down control has been suggested to drive sustained attention, it is not clear whether both endogenous and exogenous controls are recruited in transient attention task, or whether the cue-evoked attention may be interpreted as a mainly bottom-up guided process. To solve this issue, the present study focused on the preparatory brain activity of participants performing a sustained and a transient attention task. To this aim, the focus was on pre-stimulus event-related potential (ERP) components, i.e., the prefrontal negativity (pN) and the visual negativity (vN), associated with cognitive and sensorial preparation, emerging from prefrontal and visual areas, respectively. Results indicated that the pN was specific for the sustained task, while the vN emerged for both tasks, although smaller in the transient task, with a hemispheric lateralization contralateral to the attended hemifield. The present findings support the interpretation of the vN as a modality-specific index of attentional preparation, and suggest the presence of cognitive endogenous control in sustained tasks only, as revealed by the presence of a prefrontal activity that was interpreted as the locus of the top-down attentional modulation during the stimulus expectancy stage.
AB - The anticipation of upcoming events is a key-feature of cognition. Previous investigations on anticipatory visuospatial attention mainly adopted transient and–more rarely–sustained tasks, whose main difference consists in the presence of transient or sustained cue stimuli and different involvement of top-down or bottom-up forms of attention. In particular, while top-down control has been suggested to drive sustained attention, it is not clear whether both endogenous and exogenous controls are recruited in transient attention task, or whether the cue-evoked attention may be interpreted as a mainly bottom-up guided process. To solve this issue, the present study focused on the preparatory brain activity of participants performing a sustained and a transient attention task. To this aim, the focus was on pre-stimulus event-related potential (ERP) components, i.e., the prefrontal negativity (pN) and the visual negativity (vN), associated with cognitive and sensorial preparation, emerging from prefrontal and visual areas, respectively. Results indicated that the pN was specific for the sustained task, while the vN emerged for both tasks, although smaller in the transient task, with a hemispheric lateralization contralateral to the attended hemifield. The present findings support the interpretation of the vN as a modality-specific index of attentional preparation, and suggest the presence of cognitive endogenous control in sustained tasks only, as revealed by the presence of a prefrontal activity that was interpreted as the locus of the top-down attentional modulation during the stimulus expectancy stage.
KW - Bereitschaftspotential
KW - ERP
KW - Prefrontal negativity
KW - Preparatory attention
KW - Top-down control
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.007
DO - 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097795190
VL - 135
SP - 1
EP - 9
JO - Cortex
JF - Cortex
SN - 0010-9452
ER -