The contribution of bilateral working memory and parietal activation in audiovisual voluntary spatial and temporal attention

Abstract

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 this study, we focused on the neural network of attention and the function of rDLPFC, whether it modulates the attention during visual and auditory divided spatial and temporal attention. We used a top-down attention paradigm in which a visual cue directs the attention of participants to both visual and auditory target stimulus in a spatial (attention was directed to unilateral target distinctly) in VAS (visual auditory spatial) task and a temporal (attention was directed to a time point alternatively although humans are difficult to pay attention to a time point clearly) in VAT (visual auditory temporal) attention task. A non-informative cue task was also carried out in VAN (visual auditory neutral) task in order to observe the activation of working memory. Behavioral data showed no significant difference between VAS, VAT and VAN by twos. The parietal and frontal cortices were activated in both the VAS and VAT attention tasks. Furthermore, in the VAS and VAT attention task, it used a bilateral frontal-parietal network to modulate the cognition of visual and auditory target. But in the VAT attention task, right parietal cortex was not activated as well as the VAS task. The activation of DLPFC shows stronger in the spatial attention task than the temporal task, and in a non-informative cue task, the activation of DLPFC is the lowest in the three tasks.