Attentional modulation of neuromagnetic evoked responses in early human visual cortex and parietal lobe following a rank-order rule

Abstract

Top-down voluntary attention modulates the amplitude of magnetic evoked fields in the human visual cortex. Whether such modulation is flexible enough to adapt to the demands of complex tasks in which abstract rules must be applied to select a target in the presence of distracters remains unclear. We recorded brain neuromagnetic activity using whole-head magnetoencephalography in 14 human subjects during a rule-guided target selection task, and applied event-related Synthetic Aperture Magnetometry to image instantaneous changes in neuromagnetic source activity throughout the brain. During the task subjects selected one of two stimuli (the target) and ignored the other (the distracter) based on a color-rank rule (color 1 > color 2 > color 3). Our results revealed that in early visual color-sensitive areas and the parietal cortex visual stimuli evoke activity that scaled following the rank-order rule. This effect was stronger and occurred later in the parietal lobe (~200 ms after target/distracter onset) relative to early visual areas (~180 ms). Moreover, we found that transient changes in the target's motion direction evoked stronger responses relative to similar changes in the distracter at ~180 ms from change onset in contralateral areas hMT+/V5. These results suggest that during target selection and allocation of attention to a stimulus, top-down signals adjust their intensity following complex selection rules according to the organism's priorities, thereby differentially modulating neuromagnetic activity across visual cortical areas. © 2011 the authors.