A frontoparietal network for volitional control of gaze following.

Abstract

Gaze following is a major element of non-verbal communication and important for successful social interactions. Human gaze following is a fast and almost reflex-like behavior, yet, it can be volitionally controlled and suppressed to some extent if inappropriate or unnecessary, given the social context. In order to identify the neural basis of the cognitive control of gaze following, we carried out an event-related fMRI experiment, in which human subjects' eye movements were tracked while they were exposed to gaze cues in two distinct contexts: a baseline gaze following condition in which subjects were instructed to use gaze cues to shift their attention to a gazed-at spatial target and a control condition in which the subjects were required to ignore the gaze cue and instead to shift their attention to a distinct spatial target to be selected based on a color mapping rule, requiring the suppression of gaze following. We could identify a suppression-related BOLD response in a frontoparietal network comprising dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the anterior insula, precuneus and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). These findings suggest that over excitation of frontoparietal circuits in turn suppressing the gaze following patch might be a potential cause of gaze following deficits in clinical populations.