Inhibition of tactile information on visual spatial attention: An fMRI study

Abstract

Visual orienting attention is well researched by using a visual cue. But in the tactile orienting of the visual, Due to technical reasons, the explanations of the tactile information effect of visual attention is no clear, and just have few research to devoted to this part. Visual cue in the top-down attention mechanism was investigated that it could effectively improve the target cognition reaction quality. Recent brain studies showed that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) played an important role to keep the task-relevant information and task rule during tasks. In our study, We used a top-down attention paradigm in which a visual cue directs the attention of participants to both visual and tactile target stimulus in a spatial (attention was directed to unilateral target distinctly) in visual spatial attention task and tactile-visual spatial attention task. And the attention was manipulated to visual spatial orienting by a visual cue, tactile target stimulus was told to be ignored. Subjects were also scanned during a resting baseline condition in which subjects clicked the reaction key ten times. The reaction time for spatial location attention is faster than that with the tactile stimulus. Behavioral results of reaction time no have any significant difference between the two tasks. But the RTs of the VS task is faster than VtS task. So we thought that the tactile information may affecting the visual spatial attention neural network. Brain-imaging data showed that IPL (inferior parietal lobe) and MFG (middle frontal gyrus) were activated in the visual spatial attention task and the activation was enhanced during the task with the tactile stimulus.