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

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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.