Neuronal correlates of cross-modality attentional competition

为什么很难同时阅读和收听新闻，也就是说，很难在不同形式的刺激之间分散注意力？到目前为止，只有很少的研究对跨通道注意竞争进行了研究，大多数都是用行为方法进行的。例如，对于视觉和听觉刺激之间注意力竞争的神经元相关性，人们几乎一无所知。我们的第一个功能磁共振成像(FMRI)研究结果表明，跨通道注意竞争与额顶区域和相关通道特定区域的活动抑制相关。然而，他们不允许我们以不同程度和不同形式的注意力竞争来具体说明这个额顶网络的功能。这个项目中提出的实验就是为了解决这个问题。他们测试了不同程度的跨通道和通道内注意竞争对神经元活动的影响。因此，使用了不同方法的收敛强度，包括功能磁共振成像、患者研究和行为实验。特别是，行为实验将开发用于功能磁共振成像和临床人群的范例，分别用于根据参与的大脑系统来表征潜在的神经过程。总之，拟议的实验应该有助于更好地理解大脑中的注意力竞争。

Why is it hard to read and listen to the news at the same time, i.e. to divide attention between stimuli from different modalities? So far only very few studies investigated cross-modality attentional competition, most of them with behavioural methods. Almost nothing is known about neuronal correlates of attentional competition between, for example, visual and auditory stimuli. The results of our first functional Magnet Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study indicated that cross-modality attentional competition is correlated to a suppression of activity in set of frontoparietal regions and associated modality-specific areas. However, they did not allow us to specify the function of this frontoparietal network in different degrees and forms of attentional competition. The experiments, which are proposed in this project, address this question. They test how neuronal activity is influenced by different degrees of cross-modality and within-modality attentional competition. Thereby, the converging strength of different methods, including fMRI, patient studies and behavioural experiments are used. In particular, behavioural experiments will develop paradigms for use in fMRI and clinical populations, used respectively for characterising underlying neural processes in terms of participating brain systems. Altogether, the proposed experiments should contribute to a better understanding of attentional competition in the brain.