Temporal characteristics of neural activity related to target detection during visual search

Abstract

A previous MEG study on neural activities during the orientation singleton search showed that both efficient and inefficient searches shared a common neural network and the search efficiency was determined by a neural process executed in the temporal and parietal areas. The target segmentation stage, however, remains to be elucidated. In the present study, MEG and fMRI experiments were conducted, and moment-magnitudes of equivalent current dipoles were estimated with an fMRI-constrained MEG multi-dipole method to obtain differences between target-present and -absent conditions in each brain region for the whole time course. The dipole moments around the calcarine sulcus (CaS) and posterior fusiform gyrus (pFuG) increased at latencies around 70–350 ms. Activity around the CaS consisted of a prominent and a subsequent smaller but still obvious peak (117, 215 ms); the first peak showed no difference between conditions, while the second peak was significantly larger in the target-present condition. Activity around the pFuG had a prominent peak (125 ms) and subsequent small activity (237 ms), whereas the target's presence or not had no influence on either activity. The activity of the right intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was significantly larger than that for the left IPS at latencies around 196 ms irrespective of the target's presence or not. The activity of the other brain regions such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus, cingulate sulcus and central sulcus showed no difference between target conditions. The results demonstrate that neural activities of multiple regions had different temporal characteristics, and the later activity around the CaS was related to the target segregation from its surroundings during the orientation contrast search.