Abstract
Many goal-directed, as well as spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind-wandering), rely on an internal focus of attention. This fMRI–eye-tracking coregistration study investigated brain mechanisms and eye behavior related to internally versus externally directed cognition. Building on an established paradigm, we manipulated internal attention demands within tasks utilizing conditional stimulus masking. Internally directed cognition involved bilateral activation of the lingual gyrus and inferior parietal lobe areas as well as wide-spread deactivation of visual networks. Moreover, internally directed cognition was related to greater pupil diameter, pupil diameter variance, blink duration, fixation disparity variance, and smaller amounts of microsaccades. FMRI–eye-tracking covariation analyses further revealed that larger pupil diameter was related to increased activation of basal ganglia and lingual gyrus. It can be concluded that internally and externally directed cognition are characterized by distinct neurophysiological signatures. The observed neurophysiological differences indicate that internally directed cognition is associated with reduced processing of task-irrelevant information and increased mental load. These findings shed further light on the interplay between neural and perceptual mechanisms contributing to an internal focus of attention.
Highlights
We spend an essential part of our days engaged in thoughts that are unrelated to our immediate sensory environment (Kane et al, 2007; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Song & Wang, 2012)
When contrasting the internal task with a more external one, internally directed cognition (IDC) was related to increased activation in the right anterior inferior parietal lobe, the left cuneus, and in bilateral parts of the lingual gyrus, areas associated with visual imagery (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, 2001), as well as to strong decreases of activation in visual attention networks and the dorsal attention network (DAN)
In accordance with previous studies, we found a distinct eye behavior pattern distinguishing states of IDC versus externally directed cognition (EDC): Internally directed cognition was associated with reduced microsaccade rate and increased pupil diameter (PD) (Ceh et al, 2020; Gao et al, 2015; Krueger et al, 2019; Smallwood et al, 2011; Walcher et al, 2017) and further involved increased PD variance and angle of eye vergence (AoEV) variance, as well as longer blinks (Benedek et al, 2017; Salvi et al, 2015)
Summary
We spend an essential part of our days engaged in thoughts that are unrelated to our immediate sensory environment (Kane et al, 2007; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Song & Wang, 2012) These internally directed cognitions can be either goaldirected, such as in deliberate planning (Spreng, Stevens, Chamberlain, Gilmore, & Schacter, 2010), imagination (Benedek, 2018; Zabelina, 2018) and problem-solving (JungBeeman et al, 2004; Kounios & Beeman, 2009; Salvi, Bricolo, Franconeri, Kounios, & Beeman, 2015), or spontaneous, such as during mind wandering (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). In the present work, we employed fMRIeeye-tracking coregistration to measure brain activation and eye behavior concurrently during an established paradigm that manipulates internal/external attention demands (Benedek et al, 2016, 2017, 2011; Ceh et al, 2020). The most prominent contribution to the existing literature comes from examining the temporal covariation of brain activation and several oculometric parameters, investigating the neural correlates of attention-related eye behavior changes: how do neural and perceptual mechanisms interact to support an internal focus of attention?
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