TY - JOUR
T1 - Positron-emission tomography studies of cross-modality inhibition in selective attentional tasks
T2 - Closing the "mind's eye"
AU - Kawashima, Ryuta
AU - O'Sullivan, Brendan T.
AU - Roland, Per E.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 1995/6/20
Y1 - 1995/6/20
N2 - It is a familiar experience that we tend to close our eyes or divert our gaze when concentrating attention on cognitively demanding tasks. We report on the brain activity correlates of directing attention away from potentially competing visual processing and toward processing in another sensory modality. Results are reported from a series of positron-emission tomography studies of the human brain engaged in somatosensory tasks, in both "eyes open" and "eyes closed" conditions. During these tasks, there was a significant decrease in the regional cerebral blood flow in the visual cortex, which occurred irrespective of whether subjects had to close their eyes or were instructed to keep their eyes open. These task-related deactivations of the association areas belonging to the nonrelevant sensory modality were interpreted as being due to decreased metabolic activity. Previous research has clearly demonstrated selective activation of cortical regions involved in attention-demanding modality-specific tasks; however, the other side of this story appears to be one of selective deactivation of unattended areas.
AB - It is a familiar experience that we tend to close our eyes or divert our gaze when concentrating attention on cognitively demanding tasks. We report on the brain activity correlates of directing attention away from potentially competing visual processing and toward processing in another sensory modality. Results are reported from a series of positron-emission tomography studies of the human brain engaged in somatosensory tasks, in both "eyes open" and "eyes closed" conditions. During these tasks, there was a significant decrease in the regional cerebral blood flow in the visual cortex, which occurred irrespective of whether subjects had to close their eyes or were instructed to keep their eyes open. These task-related deactivations of the association areas belonging to the nonrelevant sensory modality were interpreted as being due to decreased metabolic activity. Previous research has clearly demonstrated selective activation of cortical regions involved in attention-demanding modality-specific tasks; however, the other side of this story appears to be one of selective deactivation of unattended areas.
KW - Attention
KW - Deactivation
KW - Human brain activity
KW - Regional cerebral blood flow
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.92.13.5969
DO - 10.1073/pnas.92.13.5969
M3 - Article
C2 - 7597062
AN - SCOPUS:0029041034
VL - 92
SP - 5969
EP - 5972
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
SN - 0027-8424
IS - 13
ER -