Neuronal correlates of cross-modality attentional competition

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.