Abstract
The neural mechanisms supporting auditory attention are not fully understood. A dorsal frontoparietal network of brain regions is thought to mediate the spatial orienting of attention across all sensory modalities. Key parts of this network, the frontal eye fields (FEF) and the superior parietal lobes (SPL), contain retinotopic maps and elicit saccades when stimulated. This suggests that their recruitment during auditory attention might reflect crossmodal oculomotor processes; however this has not been confirmed experimentally. Here we investigate whether task-evoked eye movements during an auditory task can predict the magnitude of activity within the dorsal frontoparietal network. A spatial and non-spatial listening task was used with on-line eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). No visual stimuli or cues were used. The auditory task elicited systematic eye movements, with saccade rate and gaze position predicting attentional engagement and the cued sound location, respectively. Activity associated with these separate aspects of evoked eye-movements dissociated between the SPL and FEF. However these observed eye movements could not account for all the activation in the frontoparietal network. Our results suggest that the recruitment of the SPL and FEF during attentive listening reflects, at least partly, overt crossmodal oculomotor processes during non-visual attention. Further work is needed to establish whether the network’s remaining contribution to auditory attention is through covert crossmodal processes, or is directly involved in the manipulation of auditory information.
Highlights
The visual and auditory sensory systems can be thought of as serving a single role—to gather information about our surroundings so that we may adapt our behavior
The study demonstrates that attentive listening is associated with changes in eye movements that are independent of visual stimuli or visual demands
This study shows that these crossmodal effects are associated with increased activity in core regions of the dorsal frontoparietal network, the frontal eye fields (FEF) and superior parietal lobes (SPL)
Summary
The visual and auditory sensory systems can be thought of as serving a single role—to gather information about our surroundings so that we may adapt our behavior . When a loud sound alerts us to a potentially dangerous situation, our eyes instinctively orient towards the source of that sound to gain further knowledge of its identity. This example highlights that the two sensory systems are intimately linked, with attention-capture in one modality often leading to recruitment of the other. We are able to control which features of a given sensory modality we wish to pay attention to. Eye Movements during Auditory Attention separation in the ‘‘top-down’’ or ‘‘endogenous’’ attentional modulation of sensory information This nuanced relationship poses a conundrum for establishing the neural correlates of auditory and visual attention, if they are subserved by separate systems
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