Attentional systems in target and distractor processing: a combined ERP and fMRI study
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirteen right-handed subjects (six females and seven male: mean age, 29; SD, 6.53 years; age range, 19–42) were recruited from an academic environment. All subjects were free from neurological and psychiatric disorders and gave informed consent to participation in the study. The study was approved by the local ethics committee.
Study design (stimuli and procedure)
A three-stimulus oddball paradigm was tested separately in EEG and fMRI sessions. A session included two different task types (circle task and square task) that differed
Behavioral data
Table 2 summarizes the behavioral results. The descriptive statistic indicated that the mean hit rates, response times, and the error rates were satisfactory and comparable to the results of the visual “difficult” condition of Comerchero and Polich (1999). Furthermore, there were no significant differences between the EEG and fMRI sessions in the behavioral data. To test this, we performed repeated measurement t tests of mean response time, hit rate, and error rate based on an a priori alpha
Discussion
The main goal of this study was to distinguish the neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive processes that are shared by target and distractor detection from those that are specific to one of the tasks. The same subjects underwent EEG and fMRI measurements while performing an identical oddball task. The behavioral data showed that the rate of successfully recognized targets was nearly identical during EEG and fMRI measurements, indicating that (a) the task was sufficiently difficult to demand
Conclusion
We investigated the interplay of the brain networks for top-down and stimulus-driven attentional control during a visual oddball paradigm. Both target and distractor detection were characterized by the engagement of a ventrolateral frontoparietal network, which indicates a common mechanism of rare-event detection in both conditions. A second dorsolateral frontoparietal network was engaged particularly in the distractor condition. This finding is compatible with a top-down regulated
Acknowledgements
C.B. was supported by an Alzheimer Forschung Initiative (AFI) grant. We thank Ruxandra Sireteanu and Konrad Maurer for constant support and advice and Michael Russ for advice on technical questions.
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These authors contributed equally to the work.