Changes of Effective Connectivity in the Alpha Band Characterize Differential Processing of Audiovisual Information in C
- PDF / 4,035,681 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 91 Downloads / 143 Views
www.neurosci.cn www.springer.com/12264
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Changes of Effective Connectivity in the Alpha Band Characterize Differential Processing of Audiovisual Information in Cross-Modal Selective Attention Weikun Niu1,2,4 • Yuying Jiang1,2,4 • Xin Zhang1,2 • Tianzi Jiang1,2,3,4 Yujin Zhang1,2 • Shan Yu1,2,3,4
•
Received: 30 October 2019 / Accepted: 6 January 2020 Ó Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, CAS 2020
Abstract Cross-modal selective attention enhances the processing of sensory inputs that are most relevant to the task at hand. Such differential processing could be mediated by a swift network reconfiguration on the macroscopic level, but this remains a poorly understood process. To tackle this issue, we used a behavioral paradigm to introduce a shift of selective attention between the visual and auditory domains, and recorded scalp electroencephalographic signals from eight healthy participants. The changes in effective connectivity caused by the cross-modal attentional shift were delineated by analyzing spectral Granger Causality (GC), a metric of frequency-specific effective connectivity. Using data-driven methods of pattern-classification and feature-analysis, we found that a change in the a band (12 Hz–15 Hz) of GC is a stable feature across different individuals that can be used to decode the attentional shift. Specifically, auditory attention induces more pronounced information flow in the a band, especially Weikun Niu and Yuying Jiang contributed equally to this work. & Yujin Zhang [email protected] & Shan Yu [email protected] 1
Brainnetome Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
2
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
3
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
4
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
from the parietal–occipital areas to the temporal–parietal areas, compared to the case of visual attention, reflecting a reconfiguration of interaction in the macroscopic brain network accompanying different processing. Our results support the role of a oscillation in organizing the information flow across spatially-separated brain areas and, thereby, mediating cross-modal selective attention. Keywords Human EEG Audiovisual selective attention Granger Causality Pattern classification
Introduction Humans are endowed with the ability to selectively attend to specific visual or auditory stimuli when faced with audiovisual information [1, 2]. This is a reflection of the more general ability of cross-modal attention, which is vital to flexibly choose the information that is most relevant to the task at hand. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying such cross-modal attention is an active field in systems neuroscience. On one side, functional imaging studies have elucidated the specific roles of certain brain areas by recording the activa
Data Loading...
