Brain hub helps us switch attention

December, 2010

The intraparietal sulcus appears to be a hub for connecting the different sensory-processing areas as well as higher-order processes, and may be key to attention problems.

If our brains are full of clusters of neurons resolutely only responding to specific features (as suggested in my earlier report), how do we bring it all together, and how do we switch from one point of interest to another? A new study using resting state data from 58 healthy adolescents and young adults has found that the intraparietal sulcus, situated at the intersection of visual, somatosensory, and auditory association cortices and known to be a key area for processing attention, contains a miniature map of all the things we can pay attention to (visual, auditory, motor stimuli etc).

Moreover, this map is copied in at least 13 other places in the brain, all of which are connected to the intraparietal sulcus. Each copy appears to do something different with the information. For instance, one map processes eye movements while another processes analytical information. This map of the world may be a fundamental building block for how information is represented in the brain.

There were also distinct clusters within the intraparietal sulcus that showed different levels of connectivity to auditory, visual, somatosensory, and default mode networks, suggesting they are specialized for different sensory modalities.

The findings add to our understanding of how we can shift our attention so precisely, and may eventually help us devise ways of treating disorders where attention processing is off, such as autism, attention deficit disorder, and schizophrenia.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/uouh-urd102810.php

Reference:

[1976] Anderson, J. S., Ferguson M. A., Lopez-Larson M., & Yurgelun-Todd D.
(2010). Topographic maps of multisensory attention.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107(46), 20110 - 20114.

Brain Regions

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