Crossmodal interactions in selective attention: A combined human lesion/transcranial magnetic stimulation study

注意力的各个方面对指导人类行为至关重要。大脑使用这些机制来增强对当前与行为相关的感觉信息的处理，并抑制不相关的感觉信息。虽然从动物和人类研究中，有相当多的知识是关于注意力如何在个体感官模式（视觉、触觉、听觉等）中运作的，关于注意力如何整合这些不同模式的信息，我们知之甚少。理解这些“跨模态”注意机制是重要的，原因有几个。首先，初级感觉区域的许多大脑活动是由个体的注意状态调节的，因此，发现跨通道注意如何工作将有助于我们理解感觉处理的神经机制。第二，人类感知的最基本方面从根本上依赖于注意力;没有注意力，我们会把来自不同感官的输入视为碎片，而不是结合在一起形成连贯的多模态表征。最后，许多获得性和发育性神经障碍的特征是注意力的衰弱性障碍。这个项目将研究中风患者的跨通道空间注意力，这些患者的大脑区域（枕叶皮层）或多感觉区域（顶叶皮层）受损。它还将测量健康参与者的跨模态相互作用的程度，使用皮质经颅磁刺激（TMS）诱导可逆的、“虚拟”的病变，模仿中风患者的病变。研究的具体目标是解释视觉和触觉的输入如何相互作用，产生连贯的感知;并通过利用任何保留的跨模态注意机制，为中风患者开发更有效的康复技术提供经验基础。

Aspects of attention are of central importance in guiding human behaviour. The brain uses these mechanisms to enhance the processing of sensory information that is currently relevant for behaviour, and to suppress irrelevant sensory information. Although there is a considerable body of knowledge, from both animal and human research, on how attention operates within individual sensory modalities (vision, touch, hearing, etc.), very little is known about how attention integrates information across these different modalities. An understanding of these 'crossmodal' attentional mechanisms is important for several reasons. First, much brain activity in primary sensory areas is modulated by the attentive state of the individual, so discovering how crossmodal attention works will facilitate our understanding of the neural mechanisms of sensory processing generally. Second, the most basic aspects of human perception are fundamentally dependent upon attention; without attention we would perceive inputs from the different senses as fragmentary, rather than as bound together into coherent multimodal representations. Finally, many acquired and developmental neurological disorders are characterised by debilitating impairments of attention. This project will examine crossmodal spatial attention in stroke patients with damage to an exclusively visual brain area (occipital cortex), or to a multisensory brain area (parietal cortex). It will also measure the extent of crossmodal interactions in healthy participants, using cortical transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce reversible, 'virtual' lesions that mimic those of the stroke patients. The specific goals of the research are to explain how inputs from the senses of vision and touch interact to give rise to coherent perception; and to provide an empirical foundation for the development of more effective rehabilitative techniques for stroke patients, by exploiting any preserved crossmodal attentional mechanisms.