Abstract
Visual consciousness is shaped by the interplay between endogenous selection and exogenous capture. If stimulus saliency is aligned with a subject’s attentional priorities, endogenous selection will be facilitated. In case of a misalignment, endogenous selection may be compromised as attentional capture is a strong and automatic process. We manipulated task-congruent versus -incongruent saliency in a functional magnetic resonance imaging change-detection task and analyzed brain activity patterns in the cortex surrounding the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) within the Julich-Brain probabilistic cytoarchitectonic mapping reference frame. We predicted that exogenous effects would be seen mainly in the posterior regions of the IPS (hIP4–hIP7–hIP8), whereas a conflict between endogenous and exogenous orienting would elicit activity from more anterior cytoarchitectonic areas (hIP1–hIP2–hIP3). Contrary to our hypothesis, a conflict between endogenous and exogenous orienting had an effect early in the IPS (mainly in hIP7 and hIP8). This is strong evidence for an endogenous component in hIP7/8 responses to salient stimuli beyond effects of attentional bottom-up sweep. Our results suggest that hIP7 and hIP8 are implicated in the individuation of attended locations based on saliency as well as endogenous instructions.
Highlights
Attentional orienting is typically separated into 2 types: Endogenous orienting is the process behind the voluntary, top-down control of the allocation of attention; Exogenous orienting refers to the bottom-up automatic capture of attention by stimuli with a high visual salience, for example, based on high contrast or sudden onset (Parkhurst et al 2002)
According to one mainstream model of visual attention, the middle intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is mostly involved in endogenous orienting while other regions such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) mostly mediate exogenous orienting (Corbetta et al 2008), but there is evidence in the neuroimaging literature that IPS plays an important role in both types of attention (Woldorff et al 2004; Kincade et al 2005; Vandenberghe et al 2005; Serences et al 2005; Corbetta et al 2008; Mevorach et al 2008; Geng and Mangun 2009; Vandenberghe and Gillebert 2009; Cieslik et al 2010; Vandenberghe and Gillebert, 2013)
We predicted that in posterior cytoarchitectonic areas such as hIP4, hIP7, and hIP8, mainly effects of saliency would be seen, whereas in more anterior cytoarchitectonic areas of the IPS the cognitive control demands elicited by the response conflict between exogenous and endogenous orienting would lead to higher activity. We examined this hypothesis within a cytoarchitectonic reference frame, encompassing the cytoarchitectonic areas within the medial and lateral wall of IPS as well as the adjacent inferior and medial superior parietal areas
Summary
Attentional orienting is typically separated into 2 types: Endogenous orienting is the process behind the voluntary, top-down control of the allocation of attention; Exogenous orienting refers to the bottom-up automatic capture of attention by stimuli with a high visual salience, for example, based on high contrast or sudden onset (Parkhurst et al 2002). Other neuroimaging studies have manipulated saliency and relevance orthogonally (Melloni et al 2012; Bertleff et al 2016; Sprague et al 2018) These studies found that saliency maps are hierarchically organized in early visual areas (V1– hV4). According to one mainstream model of visual attention, the middle IPS is mostly involved in endogenous orienting while other regions such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) mostly mediate exogenous orienting (Corbetta et al 2008), but there is evidence in the neuroimaging literature that IPS plays an important role in both types of attention (Woldorff et al 2004; Kincade et al 2005; Vandenberghe et al 2005; Serences et al 2005; Corbetta et al 2008; Mevorach et al 2008; Geng and Mangun 2009; Vandenberghe and Gillebert 2009; Cieslik et al 2010; Vandenberghe and Gillebert, 2013)
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