A real-time marker of object-based attention in the human brain. A possible component of a “gate-keeping mechanism” performing late attentional selection in the Ventro-Lateral Prefrontal Cortex

Abstract

The decision to process an incoming stimulus attentively - and to trigger a follow-up cascade of high-level processes - is strategic for the human brain as it becomes transiently unavailable to subsequent stimulus processing. In this study, we set to identify brain networks that carry out such evaluations. We therefore assessed the time-course of neural responses with intracerebral EEG in human patients during an attentional reading task, contrasting to-be-attended vs. to-be-ignored items. We measured High-Frequency Activity [50–150 ​Hz] as a proxy of population-level spiking activity and we identified a crucial component of a Gate-Keeping Mechanism bilateral in the mid-Ventro-Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (VLPFC), at the interplay of the Ventral and Dorsal Attention Networks, that selectively reacts before domain specialized cortical regions that engage in full stimulus analysis according to task demands.