A novel approach to modeling neural substrates of visual attention by decoding frontal lobe function

最近的神经生理学和/或功能性神经影像学的研究报告，额叶功能可能有助于体现在人类的视觉注意。然而，这种发现背后的神经机制却鲜为人知。在本计画中，我们应用有效连接分析与部分格兰杰因果分析于人类功能性神经影像资料，以阐明其机制。因此，首先，我们证明了额叶到顶叶的因果连接出现在一个简单的注意力任务期间的积极注意的心理状态。在接下来的实验中，我们还测试了一个假设，即这种额叶到顶叶的因果连接在空间域中以逐个表征的方式出现。但由于样本量相对较小，可能无法确认。需要进一步的研究来证实这一点。

Recent neurophysiological and/or functional neuroimaging studies have reported that the frontal lobe function may contribute to embodying visual attention in the human. What kind of the neural mechanisms, however, underlies such a finding has been less known. In this project, we applied effective connectivity analysis with partial Granger causality analysis on human functional neuroimaging data in order to clarify the mechanism. As a result, first we demonstrated that the frontal-to-parietal lobe causal connectivity emerges at an actively attentive mental state during a simple attention task. In the next experiment, we also tested a hypothesis that such frontal-to-parietal lobe causal connectivity emerges in a representation-by-representation manner in a spatial domain. However, it could not be confirmed possibly because its sample size was relatively small. Further studies are required to confirm it.