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

最近的神经生理学和/或功能神经成像研究报告，额叶功能可能有助于体现人类的视觉注意。然而，这一发现背后的神经机制却鲜为人知。在本项目中，我们将有效的连通性分析和部分格兰杰因果分析应用于人类功能神经成像数据，以阐明其机制。因此，我们首先证明，在一个简单的注意任务中，在积极注意的心理状态下，额叶到顶叶的因果连接会出现。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一种逐个表征的方式出现。然而，由于其样本量较小，可能无法确认。还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.